Compendex Expands Content

Among Engineering Village’s goals are to improve researcher success, saving them time, and providing them with quality and relevant content. A number of new updates have been made to the Compendex database on the Engineering Village platform this year. They include new and improved content within Compendex:

• Standards are a welcomed new content addition in Compendex. In 2018, IEEE standards records were introduced and indexed in Compendex, then those from SMPTE, ASTM, and ASCE followed. By March 2019, the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) standards records began being added, and AIAA standards will arrive by the end of March, with standards records from other standards development organisations also planned for the future. Both active and inactive versions of standards have been indexed, making it possible to see a standard’s development over time, while also finding the most recent version available. Universities are increasingly placing emphasis on standards literacy in engineering curricula, with courses that help student gain experience with and knowledge of standards, in preparation for entry into the corporate world. Compendex users now have the benefit of easily locating relevant standards for engineering projects and cross-searching standards content alongside journal articles, conference papers, dissertations, books, and the other forms of content discoverable within Compendex.
  
  
• Books - Between 2017 and 2018, Engineering Village added tens of thousands of books to the Compendex database. Every book and book chapter has been indexed with Ei Thesaurus controlled vocabulary terms. Overall, there are over 48,000 books in Compendex with over 205,000 book chapters. Additionally, there are over 7,600+ editorials captured from the many books indexed, most published by major engineering societies such as IEEE, SPIE, and IET and major publishers such as Wiley and CRC Press. Books provide valuable foundational content for engineers at the undergraduate level as well as for advanced engineers, who need to find specific topic information.
  
  
• Dissertations coverage was extended back to 1896. Compendex users now have access to engineering dissertations published from 1896 to the present.
  
  
• Chemical Indexing was added to Compendex records. Chemical compounds and alloys are usually written using chemical formula notation in scientific literature, making it impossible to retrieve a comprehensive result set, when only using keywords. Now, chemical elements within a chemical formula are indexed with keywords and correctly identified as chemical compounds or metal alloys. This new indexing capability has yielded significant increases in precision and recall, allowing users to find the chemical compound and metal alloy content that was previously unsearchable.