LibGuides: Biomedical Engineering: Research Papers, News Updates, and Journals

Find Articles & Journals

Here is a list of recommended databases for biomedical engineering database --- note that the special indexes for the medical literature are on a separate tab. Coverage varies by product but most help you find research papers --- including journal articles and conference papers --- on topics of interest. See more products at the big list of Databases, where you may search by subject, type, and provider.

Which to choose?

Compendex and Inspec are at the top of the list as indexes for the literature of biomedical engineering. They may be searched together or separately.
Academic Search Complete is a good option but does not include conference papers or technical reports.
If you are thinking of the business of engineering, think of ABI/INFORM and Business Source Complete.

Compendex This link opens in a new window
1884 - present. Unlimited users.
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.
INSPEC This link opens in a new window
1898 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated weekly. Indexes the research literature of physics; electrical engineering and electronics; & computers and control. Offers over 15 million records and strong international coverage. The archive portion, which was formerly separate, is now integrated with the current file.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
1900 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated weekly. The Web of Science Core Collection is a group of databases (Science Citation Index Expanded, 1900-present; Social Sciences Citation Index, 1900-present; Arts & Humanities Citation Index, 1975-present) that together cover more than 21,000 journals across all disciplines. The Emerging Sources Citation Index (2005-present) tracks thousands of additional journals that are being considered for inclusion in the main citation indexes. Other files track references from conference proceedings (1990-present) and citations to books (2005-present).
The Web of Science platform currently also provides temporary access to several databases that are not part of the Core Collection, including Biosis Citation Index, Data Citation Index, and Zoological Record.
SciFinder This link opens in a new window
1907 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated daily. Requires users to register with a utexas.edu email account. Provides integrated access to the Chemical Abstracts suite of databases with millions of bibliographic records covering the worldwide chemical literature, including patents; as well as over 100 million substance records, with chemical structures, names, synonyms, and associated property data; plus millions of searchable organic reactions. Search by topic, author, chemical identification terms (names, formulas, Registry Numbers), and chemical structures.
Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
1865 - present. Unlimited users.

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.

Collections of Papers from Societies

These databases are valuable sources and are satisfying for their full-text content but be aware that each indexes publications from one society. You will also want to search using an indexing tool with more comprehensive coverage:

IEEE Xplore This link opens in a new window
Various dates - present. Unlimited users.
Updated daily. Provides full-text access to IEEE and IET (formerly IEE) journal articles and conference proceedings. Also includes IEEE technical standards and conference proceedings from VDE Verlag. Coverage is the research literature of electrical and computer engineering, electronics, computer science, aerospace engineering, biomedical engineering, and transportation. Contains over three million records, with some content back to 1872. Also contains indexing from partner groups.
ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) Digital Library (Current) This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated weekly. Provides online access to all available volumes of the technical journals of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the complete set of ASME conference papers starting with 2002, and many older ASME conference papers.
SPIE Digital Library This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Includes more than 350,000 technical papers. These papers were published either in the SPIE Proceedings series or in one of the nine SPIE journals. SPIE journals and proceedings are core information resources for the subject areas of optics, photonics and imaging.

PubMed and Medline provide mostly the same content but with different search interfaces. Plus, we have Medline with more than one interface; Ebsco is listed here and you may also use Clarivate and Ovid interfaces --- see the Databases list.

MEDLINE (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
The Ebsco search interface for the content of PubMed.
Updated monthly. Provides bibliographic indexing from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) covering the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and the preclinical sciences. Contains bibliographic citations (e.g., authors, title, and journal reference) and author abstracts from 4,500 biomedical journals published in the United States and 70 foreign countries.
Journal articles are indexed for MEDLINE using NLM's controlled vocabulary, MeSH (Medical Subject Headings). Citations are created by the National Library of Medicine, International MEDLARS partners, and cooperating professional organizations.
MEDLINE has worldwide coverage, but 88% of the citations in current MEDLINE are to English-language sources and 76% have English abstracts.
NLM provides free access to MEDLINE through PubMed.
PubMed This link opens in a new window
The freely-available version of the primary index to the literature of medical research.
Updated weekly. Provides access to over 36 million citations in MEDLINE, PreMEDLINE, and other related databases. Links to the full text articles are provided when available, subject to UT subscription status.

Set up LibKey Nomad to find access through the UT Libraries subscriptions and purchases.

Embase is valued for additional non-U.S. coverage, compared to PubMed and Medline.

Embase This link opens in a new window
Duplicates and supplements the content of Medline/PubMed.
Embase provides coverage of the biomedical literature, with over 31 million records from over 8,500 currently published journals, including over 7 million records and more than 3,000 journals that are not covered by MEDLINE. Offers extensive coverage of searchable conference abstracts dating back to 2009. It currently indexes over 6,000 conferences covering ~350,000 conference abstracts each year. Embase uses Emtree, the Elsevier Life Science thesaurus: a hierarchically structured, controlled vocabulary for biomedicine and the related life sciences. It includes a range of terms for drugs, diseases, medical devices and essential life science concepts

Find Journals

To see if we have a particular journal (i.e. Nature, Journal of Biomechanical Engineering), either in print or electronic format, use the J OURNALS link.
You can also browse our ejournals by subject area.

"Find it at UT"

Click on "Find it at UT" (or on an icon with similar text) to link to the electronic text of a journal article. Sometimes, the linking won't get you to the text. If that happens, you should see a link to where you can request a copy.