ENGE 2984: Engineering Success: Searching
Recommended Journals
Many of the databases that I recommend will point you to journals and articles that are very technical. If you find yourself in a situation where a lot of the articles that you're finding are difficult to read, try searching within these specific journals. Click to visit and begin searching or browsing the journal you're interested in. You will be prompted to log in with your PID and password:
- Discover Magazine
- Nature
- Science
- Scientific American
- Popular Science
- New Scientist
- National Geographic
If you find articles that you like in these particular journals, I recommend that you think about where the information is coming from. Ask yourself questions like: Is the article summarizing research that was published elsewhere? Who completed the research, and where can you read more about it?
Recommended Databases
Virginia Tech Libraries has nearly 1,000 scholarly databases that you can search. Whenever you start a research project, you can begin by browsing our subject guides, which will point you to the best 4-5 databases for a particular research topic.
For your research projects in this class, I recommend three engineering-specific databases, listed below. Each of these databases contains information related to science and engineering, and should give you plenty of options to choose from as you search for articles!
- IEEE Xplore
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IEEE Xplore contains full text documents from IEEE and IEE journals, transactions, magazines, ebooks, letters, conference proceedings, standards, and IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology) publications. Full text content is provided as PDFs.Full-text journals back to 1884, conference proceedings back to 1951. - Web of Science from Clarivate AnalyticsThe three Web of Science databases index citations from journal articles and conference proceedings in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities. You can perform cited reference searches, analyze trends and patterns, and create visual representations of citation relationships. 1900-present
- Engineering VillageEngineering Village is the search interface to three engineering databases: Compendex, Inspec, and Knovel. Compendex (1884-present) indexes citations and abstracts from over 5,000 engineering journals, conference papers, books, patents, dissertations, and technical reports. Inspec (1898-present) indexes citations and abstracts from journal articles, conference proceedings, books, and dissertations in engineering and physical sciences. Knovel provides ebooks on engineering and related subjects.
- Academic Search Complete from EBSCOhost
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Academic Search Complete indexes citations, abstracts, and full text from journal articles, books, reports, and conference proceedings in all subject disciplines. Full text provided in PDF and HTML. Searchable cited references are provided for nearly 1,000 journals. Searches can be limited to peer reviewed sources. Indexing 1887-present, most full-text content 1980s-present.
