ECE 480 

Welcome to the ECE Senior Design subject guide.  This guide covers resources available to you for researching the technical literature.  Some tabs also give some tips for searching library databases.

Library Quick Links:

Albertsons Library Home Page

Books, e-Books, Media (Library Catalog)

Find Articles, Databases

Find Journal Titles

These databases are provided free of charge, though the full-text content may depend on your institutional access, and your location.

Google Scholar (Beta)

The purpose of Google Scholar is to help researchers find scholarly information on the Internet.  Google is working with several publishers to access their databases of publications, plus searching sites known to include scholarly literature.  Results include journal articles, theses, books, preprints, technical reports, and other publications.  The results may lead to the full-text of a resource, or to an abstract of a resource.  Availability of the full-text of some sources is dependant on the institution’s access to that publisher’s material.  The search engine also extracts citations from works cited in the resources indexed, leading to references that are not available full-text online. Under Scholar Preferences you can enable the Boise State University Albertsons Library "Find it" link.

Scitopia

Twenty sci-tech societies have produced a web portal for federated searching of the digital content published by these societies.  American Institute of Physics, IEEE, Institute of Physics, and the Electrochemical Society are among the societies collaborating in this venture. As with Google Scholar, access to the full-text is dependant on your institution’s access, your location, and publisher decisions about open access articles.

Periodical Articles and Conference Papers: Repositories
New developments and current research are often first presented as conference papers and/or periodical articles. The following are repositories that contain the full-text of articles from a publisher or society's publications:

ACM Digital Library
A repository of materials published by ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery including to the journal, magazine, transactions, and conference proceedings titles.  More Info

IEEE Xplore
This repository contains materials published by IEEE, the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers, and IET, the Institution of Engineering and Technology.  The IEEE/IET Electronic Library (IEL) includes full-text access to IEEE Society-sponsored transactions and conference proceedings, IET proceedings journals, IET conference proceedings and IEEE Standards.  Most coverage begins with 1988 but some content is available from earlier dates.  More Info

ScienceDirect (1997-current)
Contains articles from over 1700 journals published by Elsevier.  Although the content is multi-disciplinary, the primary focus is science, engineering and medicine.  Table of contents information is available for publication years before 1997.

Periodical Articles and Conference Papers: Indexes
New developments and current research are often first presented as conference papers and/or periodical articles.  You will also find product reviews, descriptions of methodology, or information on innovations in or applications of particular processes, systems and devices.  The following are indexes or abstracts which access this literature:

Applied Science and Technology Index, (1983-current w/abstracts since 1994),
Best source for finding product reviews and news related (engineering) information.  Indexes articles in 620 periodicals.  The print version, Applied Science and Technology Index, is available from 1958-2000 at TA 1 .I5, with an earlier title, Industrial Arts Index, available 1913-1957, with some missing issues.  More Info

Compendex and INSPEC (1896-current)
Both indexes are good sources for current and past research.
INSPEC covers over 4000 serials on topics in electrical engineering, physics, computers and control, and manufacturing.  Although periodical articles and conference papers (1896-current) are the primary materials covered, some books, dissertations and reports are also included. 
Compendex covers periodical articles and conference papers for all engineering disciplines, from 1969-current.  Over 5000 serials are included.  Print version is ENGINEERING INDEX, (1959-2000) located at TA1 .E5. Terminology used by Ei indexers can be found in EI THESAURUS, 2nd ed., ref TA158.5 .E5 2nd 1995.  More Info

Compendex and INSPEC are searched jointly on the Engineering Village Platform.  To search only one of the databases, on the advanced search page, remove the check in the box to the left of the database you do not wish to search by clicking on the box.  The check mark will be removed and that database will not be searched.

Web of Science (1900-current)
This index includes article information from approximately 8,500 journals in sciences, engineering, social sciences, arts and humanities.  The main purpose of this index is the cited reference search, which searches for the articles that have cited a particular author’s work, or a specific article.  More Info

Although not an "article", dissertations usually contain extensive literature reviews which place the topic of the dissertation into a historical context and/or give the state of current research in the area.  These literature reviews are a rich source of articles and other published materials relating to the dissertation topic and related areas.

Dissertations and Theses—full-text
Provides coverage for 2.4 million dissertations from colleges and universities around the world, and some coverage of master’s theses.  Full text is available for titles dated 1997 and after.