Who uses Engineering Village?

Engineering Village is used by over 1,100 academic institutions and leading R&D organizations worldwide. Practicing engineers of all backgrounds: electrical engineering, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, materials science use Engineering Village. R&D managers and consultants use Engineering Village. Anyone serious about engineering research should be using Engineering Village in their work.

Can I find the same articles using a free search engine?

You may find some records on a free search engine, but we guarantee that you will not find all of them. If you're looking for a known article, you can (and probably should) try using free search engines first. But if you're searching a subject, technology, author or company, you’ll want to turn to Engineering Village. Engineering Village gives you a more comprehensive, better organized and more intelligent result set. You don't want to risk missing the right article because you used the wrong tool for your research.

Is this Compendex the same database I used at the university?

Yes. Compendex is used in universities and R&D organizations around the world.

Are there other content sources available on Engineering Village?

With our institutional licenses to Engineering Village, customers have the opportunity to subscribe to other data sources, including Inspec®, NTIS, Engineering Index Backfile, Ei Patents and more. At this time Engineering Village Day Pass offers only access to the Compendex database. If you would like more information on institutional subscriptions to Engineering Village, please contact us.

What if I have another question?

We've done our best to anticipate what type of questions you may have about Engineering Village Day Pass, but it's inevitable that questions we haven't anticipated will come up. Please contact us with your questions. We'll provide you with an answer and may even add your question to our site.

Controlled Terms: While most search engines derive keywords based on the text found in a document, Compendex uses an extensive 9,000 word controlled vocabulary based on the Ei Thesaurus. This means that our indexers chose terms from a defined list to categorize the content of a document. What this means for you is that articles addressing 'MEMS' will always be labeled as 'Microelectromechanical Devices.' Of course, you'll be able to find 'MEMS' too — when that word appears within the article title or abstract.

Faceted Results: Faceted results summarize and count the frequency of a value within a result set. For example, if you were to do a search on 'Carbon Nanotubes' and an author by the name of Richard Smalley had written 38 articles, the faceted results display would read:

Richard Smalley (38)

Faceted results display the top ten values in any data field in the manner above. Facets are shown for a variety of database fields including Author, Affiliation, Controlled Vocabulary, Country and Year. You can use faceted results to help refine your original search, You can also use information contained within the data facets to derive information about your result sets.