Engineer's Guide to the Library

Now that you have some search terms, you need to find where to search. There is no single place you can search and find all scholarly articles ever written. Instead, there are a large number of databases, each of which indexes, or makes searchable, a subset of articles.

One example of a database is an internet search engine such as Google. Because they index much more than just scholarly articles, such search engines often doesn't find good results because the relevant scholarly articles are drowned out by news articles, company sites, blogs, and other types of sources. Fortunately, there are many databases to search that are dedicated to scholarly articles. Some databases include articles from a wide range of subjects, attempting to cover all subjects, or all of STEM, while other databases are much more specific, limiting themselves to a particular topic such as computer science or electrical engineering.

Usually, the best results are found by using as specific a database as possible, but it is often not a good idea to use a single database. By searching in several databases, some quite specific and some more general, you can get a better idea of what has been published on your topic.

Of course, which databases you use, and how many, is also influenced by your purpose. If you're working on a first year writing paper, a single search in a general database may give you the three or four references you need. On the other hand, if you are writing a doctoral thesis, you want to make sure you find everything that exists on your topic, and should conduct multiple searches in numerous databases.

Finding Databases

If you are just looking for a few articles on a topic, you can often find them using one of the general databases listed below. But if you need to do a more in-depth search, you will need to find subject specific databases. To find subject databases relevant to your topic, look at the various engineering research guides linked below. Each research guide contains a list of databases most relevant to that field. And for some topics you may also want to look at research guides for fields outside of engineering.

Each of these databases covers a wide range of subjects, and can be a good starting point. For more subject-specific databases, consult the research guides linked below.

After consulting the Human Factors research guide, the student, decided to initially search in three databases: 

Note that because the topic is interdisciplinary, the selected databases cover a wide range of subjects, from computer science to psychology.