LibGuides: Mechanical Engineering: Find Articles

How do I know if a journal is peer-reviewed?

What is Peer-Review?

Peer-reviewed articles have been evaluated by several researchers or subject specialist in the academic community prior to accepting it for publication. Also known as scholarly or refereed.

Verify that a journal is peer reviewed (refereed) by looking up the journal title in Ulrich's Periodicals Directory.

Remember that there may be content in peer reviewed journals which is not peer reviewed. These may be book reviews, letters, or front and back matter. In most cases, though, the research articles within will be peer reviewed. Consult a librarian if you're not sure.

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Conferences

Conference papers are important forms of publication for engineers. Many conferences regularly publish their proceedings and citations and/or full text of conference papers can be found in many of the same databases that index journal articles. These include: Compendex, Inspec,
SPIE Digital Library, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore and many others.

Database Best Bets

Compendex (Engineering Village)
Compendex is the most comprehensive interdisciplinary engineering database in the world with over 9 million records referencing 5,000 engineering journals and conference materials dating from 1884.

Information Bridge: Department of Energy
The Information Bridge: DOE Scientific and Technical Information provides free public access to over 259,000 full-text documents and bibliographic citations of Department of Energy (DOE) research report literature. Documents are primarily from 1991 forward and were produced by DOE, the DOE contractor community, and/or DOE grantees. Legacy documents are added as they become available in electronic format.

ScienceDirect
Full-text database of scientific, technical and medical information. ScienceDirect content includes journals from Elsevier and other science/technology/medical publishers in addition to an expanding suite of secondary databases.

SciTech Connect
Includes scientific and technical research results and bibliographic citations to report literature, conference papers, journal articles, books, dissertations, and patents primarily from 1943 forward (courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy).
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The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) has launched SciTech Connect, a new portal to free, publicly available DOE research and development (R&D) results. SciTech Connect incorporates the contents of two of the most popular core DOE collections and employs an innovative semantic search tool enabling scientists, researchers and the scientifically- attentive public to retrieve more relevant information. OSTI plans to gradually phase out its current DOE Information Bridge and Energy Citations products and replace them with the improved search interface of SciTech Connect.

Scopus
Scopus indexes content from 25,000 active titles and 7,000 publishers to provide a comprehensive, curated abstract and citation database with enriched data and linked scholarly content.
Quickly find relevant and trusted research, identify experts via author profiles, and access reliable data, metrics and analytical tools.
SPIE Digital Library
The SPIE Digital Library is the most extensive resource available on optics and photonics, providing unprecedented access to more than 200,000 technical papers from SPIE Journals and Conference Proceedings from 1990 to the present. More than 17,000 new technical papers are added annually.
Web of Science
Reliable, integrated, multidisciplinary research. Information on emerging trends, subject specific content and analysis tools. Includes Science Citation Expanded®, Social Sciences Citation Index®, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index™.

Other Useful Databases

Use these databases to find articles about your topic.

ACM Digital Library
Bibliographic information, abstracts, reviews, and the full-text for articles published in Association for Computing Machinery periodicals and proceedings since its founding in 1947 are available here together with selected works published by affiliated organizations.
Applied Science & Technology Index
Citations for more than 700 core English-language, scientific and technical publications. Topics include engineering, acoustics, chemistry, computers, metallurgy, physics, plastics, telecommunications, transportation, and waste management.
Applied Science & Technology Index Retrospective: 1913-1983
Periodicals and citations, book reviews, the complete files of Industrial Arts Index (1913-1957), and unique business coverage through 1957.
ASFA: Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts
Aquatic resources provided by a growing international network of information centers monitoring over 5,000 publications. ASFA is a component of the Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Information System (ASFIS), formed by four United Nations agency sponsors of ASFA and a network of international and national partners.
Business Source Complete
Indexing and abstracts for scholarly business journals back as far as 1886 . Detailed author profiles for the 40,000 most-cited authors in the database. Additional full text content includes financial data, books, monographs, major reference works, book digests, conference proceedings, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, SWOT analyses and more.
Inspec (Engineering Village)
Inspec is a leading bibliographic information database covering the fields of physics, electronics, computing, control engineering and information technology with more than 7.7 million records taken from 3,500 technical and scientific journals and 1,500 conference proceedings.
TRID
TRID is an integrated database that combines the records from TRB’s Transportation Research Information Services (TRIS) Database and the OECD’s Joint Transport Research Centre’s International Transport Research Documentation (ITRD) Database.

Journals

Lists of Journals:

Selected Journal Titles: