Welcome to the Wayne G. Basler Library at Northeast State Community College
Welcome to the Wayne G. Basler Library at Northeast State Community College
Engineering Journals are a source of quality information in the engineering disciplines. The articles are written by experts in their fields for an academic and expert audience. Peer reviewed articles are also reviewed by a panel of subject experts to ensure that the articles are accurate and of high enough quality to be published, making them the gold standard of academic literature.
One thing you need to watch for in your searching is articles that show up in academic, peer-reviewed journals that are not academic and peer-reviewed. These journals often contain book reviews and editorials, which are valuable for the people who read the journals, but are not useful as sources when doing research. Book reviews are only useful for learning about the book that is being reviewed, and editorials are opinions which are biased and not reviewed. They may be interesting, and they may say what you want to hear, but they are not reporting on research or reviewing a body of literature, and they should not be used for making decisions or as supporting evidence.
To find articles from engineering journals, the best place to look is in academic databases. While you are at Northeast State, you have access to our databases. If you attend another college or university, you will be able to use theirs. Most public libraries have some that you can use if you are a member. And as long as you are in Tennessee, you have free access to the Tennessee Electronic Library (TEL).
In our databases, and the ones you can access through TEL, you can limit your results to academic journals, as most of the databases have more types of sources available in them. In the Gale databases, there is a tab at the top for Academic Journals, and in the EBSCO databases, there is a limiter on the left side for academic journals. Both varieties of databases also have checkboxes to limit results to peer reviewed articles. In JSTOR, you can limit your results to Journals on the left under Content Type.
Some specific databases that you might find useful for engineering articles are:
Browzine can be accessed through the Library databases. It is a service that provides access to journals at the issue level, allowing you to browse the contents, and even receive email updates of newly published content. This is a good way to keep up with what is going on in the world of engineering. This page takes you to all of the Engineering journals, and you can narrow to more specific fields using the links on the left.
You can also find journal article using the Library Catalog. The library catalog contains the records for most of our databases, as well as several Open Access sources (scholarly publications that are free to everyone to use), all in one place. You can locate them by doing a search, and then limiting your results using the filters on the left of the page. You can limit to the type of Articles, although that will not get just academic/scholarly articles. You can also use Peer-reviewed Journals under availability. This will remove some academic articles, but not many.
Google Scholar is a free service from Google that searches scholarly literature. You can set it up to show you what you have access to thorough your institution. Click on the three lines at the top left of the page and click on Settings. Choose Library Links. Type in Northeast State Community College and click on the search button. Check the box next to Northeast State Community College (NeSCC) - Get It @ Northeast State, then click Save. Now, when you search on Google Scholar, it will alert you if something is available through our library. You can do this for any library you have access to.
When using Google Scholar, items that you have access to will have a link to the right of the item to get to it. If you don't see a link there, you will generally need to do an Interlibrary Loan request if you need to have a copy of that article.
There is a browser add on that you can install that will help you find articles and eBooks that are available through Northeast State when you are doing internet searches. Simply choose Northeast State Community College when prompted, and you are ready to go. LibKey Nomad will present a link in the bottom left of your screen on publisher pages when an item is available through the library which will take you to the item in question. In Wikipedia reference lists, it will present links to items we have access to.