Engineering Librarian
Conference Presentations/Posters
Engineers and academics often present their research findings to other researchers at conferences. Sometimes they will read papers aloud, or give more informal presentations with slides. Or they might present their research through a poster that is displayed (alongside many similar posters) at the conference.
Presentations at conferences are less formal than research papers, and usually don't go through the same peer review process. It is common for researchers to initially report their findings at a conference and later publish it in a research article, in which case it is usually better to use and cite the article. But some research is never published in a research article, and sometimes there are details in a conference presentation that are left out of the article. Some fields, such as computer science, put less emphasis on research articles, so a lot of important research is only reported in conferences.
Conference Proceedings
Some conferences publish proceedings containing papers, and sometimes slides or posters, that were presented at the conference. These proceedings are similar to journals, and can usually be found using the same search methods. They are easy to identify since they usually have "proceedings" in the title (though some old academic journals also use the term "proceedings" but aren't conference proceedings).
Slides and Posters
Unless they are included in conference proceedings, slides and posters from conference presentations generally aren't published. However, they are sometimes available either on the conference's website or from the presenter's own website.
Finding Conference Presentations/Posters
Conference proceedings are typically indexed in the same databases as research articles, so you can use the same approach as finding articles.
If you have a citation for a particular conference paper you want to find, see the section of this guide on Accessing Articles, Books, etc., from Citation. If you are looking for conference papers on a topic, see the section on Finding Articles and Conference Proceedings on a Topic.