- The Library

You may have been advised to use a variety of resources over and above the usual textbooks and websites by your course lecturer, project supervisor etc. But Journals and Conferences are probably new to you since in Mechanical Engineering the emphasis of your first couple of study years has been lectures and practical labs.  I've written some notes to introduce these kinds of resources and the reasons you'd want to use them.

What are they?

Journals / periodicals - different words, same meaning

 

Examples of periodical/journal titles:

You'll find a search box - the Journal Title field - on the Library Catalogue where you can type in the name of a Journal to see what holdings we have. The catalogue will show you what online journals we have available and also which print volumes are available in the library.

Remember, the Library catalogue cannot be used to find individual articles... only the titles of Journals or Conferences.

Conference Proceedings...

 

Why use Journal Articles and Conference papers?

To complete a literature review:

Your project will probably include a literature review where you will be expected to show your supervisor that you have done some research into your project topic. Among other things, this should demonstate:

  1. what the key issues and questions are in your area of research
  2. that you have an understanding of your topic, how it developed, it's current status and where it is going in the future
  3. that you can place your work in the wider context of research in that area: why are you doing this project, how does it link up with the rest of the work being done in that field?

As the main forum for engineering professionals and academic staff to report their work and research findings, journals and conference papers are  key resources to learn how a particular topic area has developed in the past and what is happening in that sector today.  Using these kind of resources demonstrates that you have carried out a broad search of the academic/professional literature available and not just relied upon the textbooks you've been using since first year.

Journal articles and Conference papers can provide you with very current information and data:

  1. Research findings are usually published in a journal/presented at a conference very soon after research has been completed
  2. Short gap between completion of research and publish date in a journal (compared to books)

The currency of journal and conference content can be valuable to you if you need to identify the key areas of research and development.  Generally speaking, textbooks spend longer in the publishing process and the sector you are investigating may have developed further in the years since a book was published.

Journals can give very good coverage of a specific research topic

  1. Primary Research journals cover very specific topics in great detail
  2. Secondary Journals provide a "review" role, for example showing how academic theory is applied in practice or commercially

Journal and Conference papers can be very specialist in nature.  For example, Primary Research papers might give a very detailed description of an engineering test method or process that a textbook only mentions as part of a more general discussion.   Meanwhile Secondary Journal sources can help you identify the practical applications of experimental methods and academic research in commercial or other 'real-world' applications.

Content is quality checked

  1. Most subscription journals (the ones the library pays for) content is peer-reviewed: this means that conclusions are checked, data is validated and experiments repeated by other experts working in the field before articles are published

I don't want to bad-mouth Google too much, but when you find a result on the wider web from a set of search engine results, the responsibility is on you to make sure you evaluate the source of that information for accuracy.  While a bit more time and energy is required to make effective use of the Library databases and online content (journals and ebooks) collections, you can spend less time worrying that the fulltext content you get is both relevant to your work and accurate.

 

Where are the Journals and Conference Proceedings?

If we have a set of Conference Proceedings in library stock, look for it in the same way you would look for a book on the catalogue:  search by title.

(The IEEE Xplore online resource does give access to a lot of the conferences the IEE and IEEE have been associated with online, but if ever in any doubt don't hesitate to ask a member of library staff.)

If you have found a reference to a journal article using one of the databases, hopefully you can link to the full text stored in the database itself or link to a journal content provider through library subscriptions using the openurl button from the database. (More advice on this topic here)

However, sometimes when electronic access isn't available you'll have to try and get hold of the print copy of a journal.

Print copies, where available, are stored in one of two places.

The catalogue gives journal locations as a PER number. For example, ALL the Mechanical Engineering titles are marked PER 62. There is an area of the journals collection where all the PER 62 (mechanical engineering) journals are shelved together. Every journal with this number is arranged in alphabetical order by title.

If in doubt, don't hesitate to ask a member of library staff on Level 3 to help you check if something is available or not.

Go to "How do I carry out a search?"

Go to "How do I find Journal Articles / Conference Papers?"

Go to "Which database/resource should I use?"

Back to Introduction page

If you would like to know more about the information contained on these pages or suggest other resources or information for inclusion please contact the Mechanical Engineering Subject Librarian, via H.C.Tacey@bath.ac.uk