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Engineering Village LibGuide: Content coverage

A guide for how to get started, search, personalize and take advantage of Engineering Village.

Ei Compendex

Ei Compendex is the broadest and most complete engineering literature database available in the world. Use Ei Compendex to find answers to the following questions, and more:

  • Where and how can apply the idea or knowledge I have?
  • What is a technical approach I should take to be ahead of competition?
  • Which materials and methods should I use and why?

Within Ei Compendex, you can search across the following content:

  • >29.5M records and growing (1970–to date), from:
    • Scholarly journals
    • Conference proceedings
    • Book chapters/book series
    • Standards, sourced directly from Standards Development Organizations, including:
      • ACI
      • AIAA
      • ASCE
      • ASTM
      • AWS
      • AWWA
      • BSI
      • IEEE
      • IET
      • SAE
      • SMPTE
      • TAPPI
    • Dissertations
    • Trade magazines
    • Preprints
  • >1.74M records from Ei Backfile (1884–1969)
  • ~1.6M records added annually
  • Full-text linking via DOIs
    • ~190 engineering subject areas
    • 2,590 publishers from 87 countries

Compendex abstracting & indexing process

  • Thesaurus-based indexing (since 1884), updated annually
  • Controlled vocabulary designed and maintained by subject matter experts
  • Domain-specific vocabulary used in indexing
  • Chemical & numerical data indexing
  • Subject-specific Indexing:
    • Delivers high precision & recall
    • Saves time
    • Resolves spelling variations/acronyms
    • Account for synonyms & homographs

(NEW) Preprints in Compendex

Over 800,000 open access preprints from arXiv (from 2017 onwards) are now discoverable on Engineering Village by all users selecting “Compendex” as the database to explore. Use the new preprints (PP) content/document type.

Preprints can be included or excluded from search by using the “Document Type” filter (which includes other document types such as journal, conference proceedings, dissertations, books, standards, and more) and are also visible in the Related Documents section. While preprints are not peer-reviewed, they offer a window into upcoming research, helping academics stay up to date with the work of their peers.

The preprints in Compendex are indexed with the controlled vocabulary from the Ei Thesaurus, enriching results when performing precise search. More content will be added weekly, including from SSRN.

Updated chart format

Discover downloadable visualizations with clickable bar and pie charts from the 'Refine' results sidebar.