LibGuides: Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering: CE 333T

Course Guide for CE 333T

We have many more Databases but here are the ones we think of first for finding journal, magazine, and newspaper articles for topics of interest in this class:

Academic Search Complete
A comprehensive and scholarly database containing magazine, newspaper, and journal articles from across disciplines.

Updated daily. A comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database, with more than 5,300 full text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. Offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 10,900 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
Features PDF content going back as far as 1865, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. Searchable cited references are provided for 1,000 journals.
Compendex
Contains more than 11 million citations with abstracts from more than 5,600 journals, reports and conference proceedings covering fields of engineering and technology.

Updated weekly. Ei Compendex indexes the research literature of the field of engineering. The product contains more than 17 million total records. Over a million new records, with abstracts, are added per year. More than 3,600 journals and 4,100 conference publications and trade magazines are currently indexed. Customizable e-mail or RSS alerts are available.
Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals
Indexes the research and popular literature of architecture, design, and planning.

Updated weekly. Indexes more than 2,000 periodicals published worldwide on architecture and design, archaeology, city planning, interior design, and historic preservation. Avery indexes not only the international scholarly and popular periodical literature, but also the publications of professional associations, U.S. state and regional periodicals, and the major serial publications on architecture and design of Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. Includes obituary citations.
ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) Research Library
Provide full text access to publications of the ASCE including journals, conference proceedings, magazines, and newsletters.

Updated weekly. Provide full text access to all publications of the ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers), including all the journals, conference proceedings, books, standards, manuals, magazines, and newsletters.
Provides full text access to all 30 journals published by the ASCE. Represents a premier source of technical information for the civil engineering profession and form the core collection in the field.
Business Source Complete
Indexes the research and popular literature of business. Much full text.

Updated monthly. A scholarly business database providing a collection of bibliographic and full text content in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics. Indexing and abstracts for scholarly business journals back to 1886 are included.
Searchable cited references provided for more than 1,200 journals. Contains detailed author profiles for the 20,000 most-cited authors in the database.
Additional full text, non-journal content includes financial data, books, monographs, major reference works, book digests, conference proceedings, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, and SWOT analyses.
Factiva
Full-Text news database, with a business focus.

Updated daily. A global information resource, providing full-text access to top national and international newspapers (including full text of the Wall Street Journal), newswires, business journals, market research reports, analysts reports and web sites. Contains over 8000 publications with content from 118 countries in 22 languages.
This database was formerly called Dow Jones Interactive.
We have a limited number of users for this database. Please select the logout option before you leave your session. When the limit is reached, a username and password prompt will probably be displayed. If this happens, simply wait 15 minutes and then try the link again.
Nexis Uni
Full-text news database. Formerly LexisNexis.

Updated continually. Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis®—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an interface that offers discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
Effective January 1, 2018, Nexis Uni™ replaces LexisNexis Academic.

Also --- not an index to articles but an index to another type of information:

Statista
Indexes and presents statistical information.

Statista provides statistical data from thousands of institutions and sources. It provides access to data from market and opinion research institutions, as well as from business organizations and government agencies.
Statista includes data on more than 85,000 topics from 18,000 sources. About 20 percent of the total data in Statista comes from sources available free online, such as the World Bank and the U.S. Census, but the data also includes numerous exclusive sources which include industry, marketing, and trade groups. Much of the data is related to marketing, demographic, government and industry information, and is international in scope. Data can be downloaded in JPG, PowerPoint and Excel.
While historical and time series data are not a focus of Statista, the metadata about each table provides all the necessary information to go to the table’s source, where historical information may be available.

Google Scholar
We like library databases for their sophisticated options but Google Scholar is available even to researchers with limited access to subscription databases. If you are a Google Scholar fan, be sure to use it through the library webpages or set the options to take advantage of the UT-Austin subscriptions.

Google Scholar uses the popular Google search engine to enable searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. It includes a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Google Scholar includes full text and citations.
Use this link to access Google Scholar, and see our Google Scholar Guide for information on using this resource.
If you encounter a warning about the security certificate when using the FindIt@UT tool in Google Scholar, you can learn more about that using this guide.

Books can provide a very comprehensive view of a topic; see Find Books for more information. By the way, a great "helper" source is:

Google Book Search
Allows us to search the contents of books to find material not easily found in a library catalog search. You may get all you need from the Google Book Search or you can then obtain the book through the Libraries.

Updated daily. Searches complete text of books from selected library collections and publishers. Search works just like a regular Google search -- when book content contains a match for selected search terms, Google provides links to it in the search results. Depending on a few factors, Google displays everything from a few short excerpts to the entire book.
Each book includes an "About this book" page with basic bibliographic data like title, author, publication date, length and subject. For some books, additional information like key terms and phrases, references to the book from scholarly publications or other books, chapter titles and a list of related books.

Government websites are a wealth of information and can include technical reports, statistics, data, legal cases, patents, case studies, and much more.

Tip: Search Google and filter your results by .gov (or .mil).

Reference sources can help you find and develop a research topic by providing background information, facts, statistics, dates and other general information on most topics.

Gale eBooks
This collection of encyclopedias and handbooks helps by providing background information and definitions.

Updated regularly. A database of encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources. Fully searchable across all files. A list of sources included in our subscription is available.
For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide
CQ Weekly
Topics in the news are described with a non-biased approach. Problems and potential solutions explained.

Archival access. Known as the pre-eminent resource for Congress-watchers who need non-partisan information on Capitol Hill. Provides legislative news and analysis consistently hailed for its accuracy and comprehensiveness. Includes access to the full text of all articles published since 1983. Browse articles by date or topic or search for articles by words, dates, subjects or other criteria.
Coverage includes: nonpartisan feature-length articles on a full array of policy topics, focused updates on committee activity (the status of bills, votes, and more), useful side-by-side comparisons of competing versions of bills, and the most thorough coverage of appropriations.
Annual complilation of this information with coverage back to 1945 is available in CQ Almanac.

We look for newspaper coverage to tell about events as they happened, usually without the advantage of longer analysis and sometimes with eye-witness accounts.

But accessing newspaper content can be a challenge. This guide helps with the locating newspapers in the University Libraries:

Finding News
by Meryl Brodsky Last Updated Jun 12, 2020 1988 views this year

If you have a particular newspaper in mind and want to know if you can access it at UT-Austin, use:

Journals

Sometimes using a newspaper's website or through another source, you may learn about an article not available to us at UT. That is when you should ask for a copy of the article through interlibrary library loan. At UT, the service is offered through:

Interlibrary Services
A great service offered to those currently affiliated with UT-Austin. There is no fee. Users must only register and complete a request form for each item needed.

1. Background information

Gale eBooks (written by experts, vetted by editors)
Books - Check out Find Books for more information
Government websites

2. Find articles using library databases. For example:

Academic Search Complete - multidisciplinary
ASCE- Civil engineering
Compendex - Research literature of engineering
More engineering databases

Searching Tips:

Use keywords and synonyms

Think of the official or scientific terms for common words e.g. "unmanned aircraft" for drones or "hydraulic fracturing" for fracking.

Add additional terms to refine your results
- fracking AND wastewater
Try to avoid generic words like pros and cons

If you need articles related to GMOs and their benefit to society consider using terms like “agricultural productivity” or hunger. If you are lacking information on the negative side try adding terms like “health risks" or environmental.

Example search results:

gmo = 2,829
(gmo OR genetically modified organism) = 4,234
(gmo OR genetically modified organism) AND hunger = 35
(gmo OR genetically modified organism) AND (hunger OR famine) = 41
(gmo OR genetically modified organism) AND (hunger OR famine OR droughts) = 87

There is no one “right” way to search. These are just a few tips and suggestions, if you are having trouble finding information – email me! I can help with choosing keywords or recommend databases and other resources.

Ask for help if you

can't finding enough material on your topic
can't locate the full text of an article
can't find a book or are having problems with an e-book

Sometimes you want to know what a particular person has written. That person may be a professor, a person in the news or the author of something you have just read. To search by author:

Library databases such as Academic Search Complete and Compendex have options for author searching --- in this case the results would be journal articles by Katz. The "Texas" limit helps by searching the author's affiliation, even though there is not an affiliation field limit; some databases have that. Other databases such as Compendex and ASCE Research Library offer indexing of both journal articles and conference papers.

In the library catalog, we can construct a similar search. This time, the results will be book records. Usually we will not have the advantage of an affiliation limit and will be looking instead for material by a person with the right time on the right topic.

Google Scholar offers an advanced search with an author-search option:

Finally, many professors post lists of their publications on the webpages of their university.

Citation Searching
This guide explains citation searching and shows how to do this kind of work in Web of Science and in Google Scholar.

Cite Your Sources is a guide to help you:

understand what a citation is
avoid plagiarizing
properly cite a source using a style manual
- APA Style Guide for Electronic References - UT access; limited to UT students, faculty and staff
- APA Documentation Guide - The Writing Center at The University of Wisconsin - Madison

If you need help, please contact a member of the library staff.

Call: 512-495-4503 (for Larayne Dallas, librarian for Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering); 512-495-4511 is the main phone number at the Engineering Library.
Mail: ldallas@austin.utexas.edu; englib@lib.utexas.edu is the general e-mail for Engineering Library staff.
Ask a Librarian, including Library Chat.