Engineering, Electronics, Materials science and Mathematics

In many cases, you can find journal articles using Library Search. But there is a huge range of specialist databases which provide more sophisticated searches for journal articles in many different engineering disciplines.

Most of these databases will include similar material alongside journal articles, most commonly trade papers or conference proceedings.

Depending on your course or assignment, you may find several sets of journal databases useful: so, for example, if you are doing automotive engineering, as well as the dedicated Automotive engineering databases, at different stages of your course you might find the some of databases for All courses, Mechanical and manufacturing engineering, Materials science, and Design engineering useful. You can use the menu on this page to navigate to the suitable databases for your course.

There may be occasions where the university doesn't have a subscription to a particular journal or conference proceedings. However, in the vast majority of cases, it is still possible to access the article or paper when this happens.

An increasing number of articles- and even whole journals- are now Open Access, which means there is free access to the full-text of an article even for non-subscribers. Open access material can be accessed just like any other available content in search results. Open Access status is often indicated by an icon of an open padlock next to a article in results, and many databases will feature an open access filter to return only Open Access results.  There are also specific tools for searching for Open Access content: you can find out more about these on the How to Access Full Text guide:

Where material is not available via Open Access, it is still possible to obtain most journal articles and conference papers via the Document Supply Service. If you put in a document supply request, a copy of the requested article or paper will be emailed to you for free. There is same-day delivery for most requests: even where this is not possible, delivery usually takes place within a working week.

The SHULinks widget that appears in the search results of many databases provides a quick and easy way of submitting a document supply request. As they feature SHULinks and cover an especially broad range of subjects and publishers, the databases Scopus and Web of Science are ideal for searching for and requesting content that Sheffield Hallam does not subscribe to.

You can also set up Library Search to search for content outside Hallam's own Library in order to make document supply requests.

These are enormous, general-purpose science and technology databases, suitable for all courses in engineering. They also all offer citation searching to make it easier to find even more relevant articles..

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There are several journal databases for materials, each focusing on a different type of material or aspect of material science. However, most of them use the same interface and work in a similar way.

There are several journal databases which are not dedicated solely to mathematics, but which contain a very large number of articles on mathematics amongst other subjects. Please see the Journals for all courses box on this page for more information.

Currently the only AIAA journal we subscribe to is Journal of Aircraft. However, you can obtain articles from the other AIAA journals for free within a couple of days via the document supply service. The first two databases both index the AIAA journals, so that you can find articles from them.

This is a big topic, and you can also find useful resources in other subject guides, such as Nursing and Midwifery, Biosciences and Chemistry, and Health.

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Many databases which search for journal articles will also search for conference papers. Conference papers- sometimes also called conference proceedings- are articles based on presentations delivered at academic or industry conferences.  They sometimes feature complete pieces of research: but they often are based on preliminary results or work-in-progress from ongoing research. Conference papers may be published in the form of journals, books or websites.

Most conference papers don't go through the quality control process of  peer review in the same way as academic journal articles. However, this is not always the case, and some conference papers may have gone through peer review: check the details of the conference to find out if this is the case.

Because they are not always as extensive or rigorous as formal journal articles, conference papers are often considered to be not such high quality sources to use in your work. However, some conference papers go through exactly the same quality-control process as journal articles: and the latest conference papers can be very valuable because they will include new information and ideas that has not yet reached the journals. This is particularly true in the case of fast-developing areas of research.

While we have a few collections of conference papers, we don't have subscription access to most conferences. However, conference papers can be obtained via the document supply service in the same way as journal articles and can be supplied for free within a matter of days. The SHULinks option that appears in many databases will give you the links to request a conference paper via DSS.

You may also sometimes encounter conference abstracts. Rather than a full article, these are just short summaries of conference presentations. If you do find a conference paper and want to learn more about the research, it is often worth using a database to search for work by the same authors: in most cases, the authors will have gone on to write up and publish their research in the form of a journal article at a later date. This will give you a much fuller account of the completed research than the abstract or conference presentation.

As well as directly searching for specific subjects, there are also tools which will let you browse through journals and keep up to date with the contents of new issues of key titles.