Library:Research Skills For Engineering Students/Module 05/Page 06

Compendex is a database for scholarly engineering resources. It contains millions of articles from engineering journals and conference proceedings, some of which may not be found in Summon.

To access Compendex, click the Indexes & Databases tab from the UBC Library homepage, and search for “Compendex.” Click the database name to access it.

When searching Compendex, it’s best to enter your concepts into separate search boxes. You can use search operators described in part 1 of this module within each search box, as well as through the drop-down selections on the left-hand side.

For example, let’s review one of our research questions from module 1, “What types of buildings or infrastructure are most susceptible to earthquake damage?” We might start by searching for:

	building*	OR	infrastructure
AND	earthquake*	OR	seismic
AND	susceptib*	OR	risk*

You’ll see that the number of results retrieved by Compendex are much less than those from Google or Summon. The results are primarily scholarly journal articles and conference proceedings, focused on engineering topics.

Once you have a results list, you can sort them by relevance, date, author, or source. There are a number of filters or limits on the left-side of the search results screen - explore these to determine some of the most helpful options for you!

To learn more about an article, click the Detailed link. Here, you can see more information about the authors, source, and read the abstract.

You’ll also see a number of terms in the article record - these are controlled vocabulary or subject headings introduced in module 5, part 1. They describe what the article is about. The terms make up the database’s thesaurus, which contains synonyms, as well as broader and narrower terms. You can search the thesaurus by using the Thesaurus Search tab from the Compendex search page.

For example, if we search for Skyscrapers, we’ll see that we are directed to use the term Tall buildings. A broader term for Tall buildings is Buildings. The thesaurus helps capture the various terms that can be used to describe a single concept. Not every term is found in the thesaurus; do a keyword search if you can’t find your term. Ask a librarian for help with the thesaurus if needed!