If you are a student in mechanical engineering and related subjects you should be familiar with and use the following information sources in the field of technology. Here they are grouped by type.
References
COMPENDEX
Database with references from the worlds leading publications in engineering and technology. Material from 1970- within the subject fields energy, environment, geology, biology, electricity, automation, nuclear science, space technology, computers, robots and industrial robots. Covers close to 3000 journals.
INSPEC
Contains references to articles, books, proceedings etc. in the fields of physics, computer science, electronics, electrical engineering, information technology etc. Whether you click the Compendex link or the Inspec link in the Library’s list of databases, both databases are searched jointly from the same interface.
ISI
Offers search facilities in three citation databases: Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. Citation databases are used when you want to know who has quoted a certain researcher, in short “Who quotes who in science”. This can be of help if you want to try to identify “the great” names in a field of science.
Material
Apart from these big commercial databases, there are also some free resources that can be recommended:
MatWeb, The Online Materials Information Resource (Information about different materials); PSI, Polymer Search on the Internet (About Polymer material) and Worldwide Composites Search Engine (About composite materials).
Patents
It is important to know about patents in all product development. Patents protect technical solutions and inventions. A patent gives you the sole right to use the invention professionally. This means that nobody else has the right to use it, e.g. for manufacturing or selling. On our web page you will find links about patents; what patents are, how to search, laws and regulations and a number of patent databases. Here you will also learn more about the patent system and its possibilities.
At the Swedish Patent and Registration Office web site you will find, among other things, “Svensk Patenttidning” where all Swedish patent applications and patents are announced. In this journal you will also find rejected applications, new patents and objections. The journal also contains announcements of European applications and patents. At www.prv.se you also find the PRV Library. There you can search the databases that the library produces, order copies and loans from the Library’s collections, use electronic journals, plus get access to a collection of links to quality assessed Internet resources in the authority’s field of work.
To search documentation about patents oneself can be both time consuming and hard work. PRV has a department, InterPat, that conducts searches for the public at cost price. Good, free access resources in patents are:
Esp @cenet, Europe’s Network of patent databases. In the database there are more than 30 million national and international patents searchable since 1980.
USPTO WebPatent Databases – US Patent from 1976 onwards in full text.
Read more about patents in the section Database guide.
Standards
For engineers it is also important to know something about standards and to know how to search for standards. Much of what you need to know is available in the document “Information about Standards”. Here you will find basic information about the use of standards, plus methods for seeking standard documents.
ISO (The International Organization for Standardization) is an International organization where 130 countries cooperate. The organization’s database is open for free searches.
Also Swedish standards can be searched for free via SIS, Swedish Standards Institute’s database. There is also a search function for foreign standards. You can search quickly among 516 000 standards from ISO, DIN, BSI, IEC, AFNOR among others directly from your own computer. Read more about standards in the section Database guide.
Product- and company registers
Product- and company registers can often be useful for technicians. One such register is the Swedish Kompass where you can find facts about Swedish companies and their products.
Full text
If you want to find full text journal articles you should search the database ELIN @Blekinge. Here you will find articles in various subjects, but also many articles in subjects that might be of interest to you. Something to bear in mind when searching ELIN is to be inventive about search terms. When you search here, you search a large number of databases simultaneously and thus there is no common thesaurus.
Another valuable full text resource is ebrary which contains about 20.000 books in full text. It spans the most diverse subjects, but more than half of these are about technical subjects.
Dictionaries
In order to search the international databases English must be used as the search language. It is not always easy to find relevant terms with an ordinary dictionary. Many of the big databases on different subjects have a thesaurus, i.e. a list of the subject words that are used in that specific database. By using the thesaurus it is easier to find relevant the subject words that give the most exact terms for searching.
If you are just looking for a short explanation for a concept a dictionary can be a good aid when searching. On the web you find the site “Technical English dictionaries and glossaries” which lists a great many dictionaries in technology.
Encyclopaedias
A good and rather exhaustive survey article can often be found in both general encyclopaedias as well as more subject specific ones. Nationalencyclopedin and Encyclopedia Britannica are two examples of great and extensive general dictionaries.
A big encyclopaedia in technology and science is the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology, as is the Wiley Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering.
