LibGuides: Electrical and Computer Engineering: Research Papers, News Updates, and Journals

Find Articles & Journals

Here is a list of recommended databases for electrical and computer engineering. 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:

Inspec is the special index for electric and computer engineering.
Compendex offers the broadest search of the research literature of engineering.
Academic Search Complete is one of our favorite indexing products. It has good coverage of engineering topics and also of related fields. It is important to know that conference papers are not indexed.
If you are designing medical devices, be sure and consider using MEDLINE/PubMed and Embase.

IEEE Xplore is not a subject index for electrical and computer engineering; that is, it doesn't index across a wide range of publishers. It is the database of the IEEE, with additional material from some other publishers.

INSPEC This link opens in a new window
abstracts to worldwide literature of physics, electronics and electrical engineering, computing and control, and information technology
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.
Compendex This link opens in a new window
a comprehensive database of scientific and technical engineering research, covering all engineering disciplines.
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.
ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Digital Library This link opens in a new window
Be sure to use the "ACM Guide to Computing Literature." This indexes publications from sources besides the ACM. This is the main index to the research literature of computer science.
Updated frequently. The product has two parts:
- The ACM Full-Text collection. The full-text of ACM publications.
- The ACM Guide to Computing Literature. Described as, “the most comprehensive bibliographic database in existence today focused exclusively on the field of computing."
See here for summary information on full-text and indexed materials, with more detail here.
ABI/INFORM Global This link opens in a new window
Indexes the business literature. With the ProQuest interface.
Updated daily. In-depth coverage of business issues, management techniques, competitive information, and a variety of other topics.
Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window
Ebsco's index to the research and popular literature of business. Lots of 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.
Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Indexes journal articles, magazines, and major newspapers across academic disciplines. One of our favorites. Lots of full-text. Does not index conference papers.
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.
MEDLINE (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
Also known as "PubMed" in a slightly different version. Indexes the medical literature --- often important to mechanical engineers. We have the database in multiple versions. "PubMed" has the freely available interface.
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.
Embase This link opens in a new window
Indexes the research literature of medicine. Overlaps with Medline/PubMed and also includes additional European and pharmaceutical literature.
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
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Broad coverage of the research literature in science and technology.
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.

For News Coverage

Factiva This link opens in a new window
A news database, especially important for providing the text of newspaper articles and news announcements.
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 This link opens in a new window
A full-text news database, with the text of newspaper articles and other news sources. Also, important for legal content.
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.

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
Also significant content from the IET.
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.
To see the publications to which UT-Austin has access, sign in and click in the navigation bar.
In search results, the subscription identifier icon indicates documents where the UT-Austin subscription enables full-text access.
SAE Mobilus This link opens in a new window
1906 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Providing resources on technologies related to the automotive, aerospace, and commercial vehicle industries. Including:
- SAE Technical papers, 1906+
- SAE Journals, 2008+
- SAE Magazines, 2023+
- SAE E-Books, 1990+
- SAE Standards, current version
- Ground vehicle
- Aerospace
- Aerospace Material Specifications
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.

If you don't see a PDF or HTML link, connecting you to the full article, click the button to see if the article is available in another database or in print in one of the UT Libraries.

If it's only available in print or you can't see how to otherwise get a copy, go to and complete a request form.

Find Journals

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

Journal Collections

Engineering Societies: see the print and full text holding for more than a dozen key engineering societies such as AIAA, ASCE, ASME, IEEE, SAE, SPE, SPIE and more!