LibGuides: Materials Science and Engineering: Literature

Index Databases

To search the technical literature, including journal articles, patents, technical reports, conferences, etc., use an index database. These are the best:

SciFinder
Very comprehensive coverage of journals, reviews, and patents in the chemical and materials literature. Personal registration required. See our SciFinder guide for more information.

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. For more information, visit the SciFinder guide.
Compendex
Engineering Index (aka Compendex) has wide coverage of journals and conferences in all engineering fields.

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
Database covering the journal, conference and report literature of physics, electrical and computer engineering, and related fields. Good coverage of electrical-related materials.

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
Wide coverage of journal literature in all fields.

Updated weekly. Covers more than 12,000 journals in all subject areas. Also includes citations to conference proceedings. Choose Search in order to search the database by topic, author journal or address. This search includes articles, reports, books and book reviews and may be searched by keyword (topic searching), author (person searching), institution, or geographical area. Choose Cited Reference Search to search for articles that cite an author or work. This search includes the list of references at the end of articles and will allow you to search by the cited author, cited work, cited year or a combination of the three. Choose Advanced Search to combine aspects of the other two searches. The default selection for searching is for all the citation databases and for all years of coverage; both selections can be changed from the main search screen at the time that you select your search.
The Web of Science platform currently provides temporary access to several databases that are not part of the Core Collection, including Biosis Citation Index, Data Citation Index, and Zoological Record
OSTI.GOV
Index to DOE-sponsored technical reports (including full text of 450,000), journal articles, conference papers, books, patents, etc. 1940s-current.

Updated regularly. Provides bibliographic and full text access to the Department of Energy (DOE) research and development reports in physics, chemistry, materials, biology, environmental sciences, energy technologies, engineering, computer and information science, renewable energy, and other topics.
Google Scholar
Handy but black-box machine indexing of digital content from journals, reports and patents.

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.

Full Text Sources

AccessEngineering
Provides access to hundreds of McGraw Hill handbooks, textbooks and monographs across all engineering fields, a materials properties visualization tool, interactive tables and equations, downloadable spreadsheets, and instructional videos.

Updated regularly. Provides access to hundreds of McGraw Hill handbooks, textbooks and monographs across all engineering fields, a materials properties visualization tool, downloadable spreadsheets, and instructional videos.
ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) Digital Library (Current)
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.

ECS Digital Library
Platform for the electronic journals and proceedings of the Electrochemical Society.

IEEE Xplore
Papers from IEEE journals and conference proceedings.

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.
MRS Online Proceedings Library
Conference papers from the Materials Research Society.

Updated regularly. Features almost 100,000 peer-reviewed papers presented at MRS Meetings. Proceedings content is available electronically since volume 1 (1980).
Searching in this database also provides access to articles available through UT-Austin's subscriptions to journals from the MRS, the MRS Bulletin and Journal of Materials Research.
The Materials Research Society focuses on the study of the structure and properties of any material, as well as using this body of knowledge to create new materials and tailoring the properties of a material for specific uses.
SPIE Digital Library
Technical papers from SPIE conferences and journals.

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.

E-Books, Books and Printed Materials

Library Catalog

Search in the Library Catalog by keyword for classes of materials, concepts, and techniques. Remember that the topics of books are much broader in scope than the topics of individual articles. You'll find both e-books and print books there. Materials science is highly interdisciplinary, so printed books are located across multiple locations in the University Libraries, primarily in the Engineering Library (EER), Chemistry Collection (PCL 6th floor), PMA Library, and various storage facilities.

The Library of Congress Classification System reflects the scattered nature of the subject. These are call number areas where most print books are classified:

QC 176 - Solid state physics / Condensed matter physics
QD 380-388 - Polymer chemistry
QD 878 - Supramolecular chemistry
QD 900-999 - Crystallography
TA 401-409 - General materials science
TA 410-418 - "Special" materials, including composites, nanomaterials. etc.
TA 455 - Materials properties and testing
TA 459-489 - Metals and alloys
TK 7871 - Electronic materials
TN 600-799 - Metallurgy
- TN 690 - Alloy phase diagrams
TP 1087-1190 - Plastics and polymer engineering

Keeping Track

Managing your literature searching and PDF files over the long term is a headache. Consider choosing a reference manager tool to save you time and hassle. Most have free versions but more powerful versions can pay back your investment quickly.

Research Organization with Citation Managers
by Larayne Dallas Last Updated May 10, 2022 1816 views this year