ENGR 103: Engineering Design Lab III -- Resources

This page contains links to resources discussed in Engineering 103 classes. For more resources, please see our Fundamentals of Engineering Research Guide, as well as our other Engineering Resource Guides. Also, feel free to contact the engineering librarian.

Finding Books

Searching the catalog for books on engineering:
Try a keyword search:
robotics design process
Try a subject search:
Engineering Design Communication in Engineering
Include the type of book you are looking for:
materials AND handbook engineering AND encyclopedia
Use truncation for more results:
chemi* retrieves... chemistry, chemist, chemical, chemically, etc.
Or, browse ebook collections:
ENGnetBASE: CRC Engineering Handbooks Online Knovel: Engineering & Scientific Online References Ebrary: an extensive ebook collection covering all subjects
There are a number of reference books available online. How can I find out which reference books are available from our Library's web site?
What is AccessScience? How can I access it? What are Bookmarklets?

Using Summon:
Try Summon to find books, articles and more. See also What is Summon? How can I use it? Click on Articles & More Tab in the Library Home page. For example, type ‘Mobile Robots’ and click on Search Library link. Refine your search results by selecting an option from the left column.
Most journal articles reside in the library's databases. You can always find a specific journal (Engineering Management Journal, for example) by searching in the library catalog. If you don't know exactly what you're looking for, search for your topic in a library database. A few suggested databases are below; for the full list of library databases, arranged by subject, see our Databases by Subject page
ProQuest Research Library ProQuest is an excellent multi-disciplinary database. It contains both scholarly and popular articles on a very wide variety of topics. It is not intended to be used for engineering research, however you will likely find relevant information for your projects.
Engineering Village Engineering Village is the premier tool for searching engineering literature. It provides a combined interface for searchig the Ei Compindex and Inspec databases as well as handbooks, patents, and standards.

RefWorks is a "bibliographic management system" that allows you to save the citations for sources you've found, organize them, and then create a properly-formatted bibliography from your sources. You can even import the citations directly from our databases. Using RefWorks will save you hours of typing!
RefWorks To use RefWorks, you must create an account from an on-campus computer. After that, you can access it over the web from anywhere! Follow the link above to get started.
Help With RefWorks If you are having problems using RefWorks, try one of our tutorials. Or, ask a librarian!

USPTO The US Patent and Trademark Office is the authority for all US patents. Patents can be searched and retrieved for free, but you must use the UPSTO plugin to view patent images.
Google Patents Google has recently started offering a service similar to the USPTO. However, we have found that Google returns more extraneous results than the USPTO and there is no easy way to print or save the patent images.
pat2pdf.org A free service that, when given a patent number, will return an image of the patent as a single PDF file. This is much more useful than either the USPTO or Google image viewers.

Jay Bhatt is Drexel's Engineering Librarian. He is here to help you with all your research and information needs. Please feel free to contact him!
Englibrary Blog Jay Bhatt's very useful blog about engineering library resources. Updated frequently; try searching in it for topics of interest.
See also ENGR102: Bridge Design Resources and ENGR102-Robotics Module
Other useful sites:
Starting your research for design projects
Specific information needs for engineering design projects
How do I find what books are available on AUTOCAD? on MATLAB?
Search for material properties using Knovel
IEEE Citation Reference

Content Editor: Jay Bhatt
Last Updated: 03/06/2013