Compendex (Engineering Village 2)

Search:  From the Search In pull-down menu, you may select either “All Fields,” “Author,” or “Serial Title.” “All Fields” is recommended for searching on a topic. For assistance with the fields, click on the ? icon next to the pull-down menu.

In the Quick Search option, you may use an asterisk as a wild card to retrieve all words beginning with part of a word such as optic* (retrieves optic, optics, optical, etc.). You may limit by year, document type, and language by changing selections in the boxes labeled Limit By.

Browse Indexes:  Note that you may also browse the Compendex Index for subject terms, forms of authors’ names, and serial titles indexed by the database. For example, if you want to find all the papers written by R. J. Aaberg, select Author from the list titled Browse Indexes on the right side of the search screen, and click Browse. When you search for Aaberg’s papers (put his last name first) you will see that the database includes two forms of the name: Aaberg, R.J. and also Aaberg, Rolf Jarle. You will want to search under each of these variants in the Quick Search option.

As you select items from the index, the selections are added to your search using the Boolean connector listed in the Connect terms with: bar.

For help with Boolean searching, or any of the features of the database, see the Help link available from the Quick Search screen.

Compendex Quick Search.

You may select multiple citations that interest you by clicking on the box beside them. Then choose View Selections to look at your list. From there, you may choose to display Citations, Abstracts, or Detailed Records. You can email, print, or download your selected results from this screen.

Refine Results — To the right of the Results, a list of categories appears [not shown]:  Author; Controlled Vocabulary; Document Type; Year; Publisher; etc. Under each category, there is a list of the most shared terms between the articles. You can add these terms to your search or replace all your terms with the new ones and begin again.

Compendex Search Results / Citation List.

Besides being able to e-mail, print, download, or save selected records to a folder, you can also use Blog This to create a link and share the abstract of each selected record on your Blog or Web site.

Locating Full-Text/Print or Online:  Clicking on Search for Full-Text (2) lets you use the Article Linker which, not only provides you with access to the HELIN Catalog's holdings, but also provides you with possible access to free online databases that carry the needed journal article(s). Compendex does provide its own link to Full Text (3) but many of those links take the researcher to online sources that require payment for their material.

J. Williamson• 9/00, rev. 3/01; A. Izenstark rev. 6/03; BTG 7/05