Research Assistance
(530) 752-9862
Welcome to the library subject guide for Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE)! UC Davis Library provides a wealth of subscription and licensed resources that can help students, faculty, and researchers identify articles, proceedings, standards, and books in a print or electronic format. The following guide will point you to a selection of specialized and related ECE resources to help get you started with your research.
Where to Start?
The following are a selection of core databases or digital libraries that focus on ECE topics
A searchable index to Association for Computing Machinery articles and conference proceedings, and selected affiliated organizations, with links to the full-text articles and conference papers.
Compendex is the most comprehensive bibliographic database of scientific and technical engineering research available, covering all engineering disciplines. This is the premier engineering literature database.
Provides access to full-text Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) transactions, journals, conference proceedings, and standards and IEE/IET journals and conferences.
Citations from scholarly journals, conference proceedings, books, reports, and dissertations in physics, electrical engineering and electronics, computers and control, and information technology.
A large interdisciplinary resource that extends across disciplines in the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities.
A database for finding article citations in all fields of science and engineering
More specialized databases, but equally good choice if your focus is related to electrochemistry or optoelectronics
Searchable online access to the various journals, books, and other collections published by The Electrochemical Society
- Material Science Forum (Trans Tech publications)
Papers in materials science
A searchable index to Optical Society of America (OSA) articles and conference proceedings with links to full text.
Full-text access to SPIE (International Society of Optics and Photonics) conference and journal papers
Books
How to find books (print and digital) at UCD and beyond
Library Catalog (formerly Harvest Catalog)
The Library Catalog tells you what the UC Davis library owns, what the call number is, where it is located, and whether or not it is checked out. If there is an electronic version that we subscribe to, the link will be in the catalog.
Use the catalog to locate books, journals, government documents, dissertations, maps, music scores & recordings, movies, and any other materials the library owns.
MELVYL UC Library Catalog Melvyl Help
The MELVYL catalog tells you what all UC campus libraries own, and also searches other institutions. As with the UCD Library Catalog, MELVYL gives records for books, journals, government documents, dissertations, maps, music scores & recordings, movies, and other materials.
MELVYL does index some articles but is not a good option for searching for articles in the sciences.
The REQUEST button: allows you to request items from other institutions (UC and non-UC).
GOOGLE Books Google Books Help
Library catalogs only search catalog entries (author, title, subject indexing, etc) not the full text of the book
Google Books searches full-text of books (only titles that Google has scanned), but you cannot access most of them (because they are still under copyright)
But you can use Google Books to identify titles you might be interested in.
–Use Google Books to search for phrases or topics you are intereted in (works well for technical terms).
–Then search for the title of the book(s) in the UCD Library Catalog or Melvyl
OCLC catalog: millions of records for books, journal titles and materials in other formats from approximately 12,000 libraries worldwide. Coverage: 1000 A.D. to the present.
ECE Handbooks, Encyclopedias, and Dictionaries
A selection of references book useful in the ECE fields
Handbooks:
General ECE
- The Computer Engineering Handbook, 2v
2008 edition available in Print at PSE Library, call no. TK7885 .C645 2008
2002 edition available online
Available in print at PSE Library, call no. TK151 .K583 2007
- Electrical Engineering Handbook, 2006 6 v
Older editions (1997 & 1993) available in print at PSE Library, call no. TK145 .E354
Also available in print at PSE Library, ,call no. TK7825 .E34 2005
Batteries
Available online
1999 edition available in print at PSE Library, call no. TK2941 .H26 1999
Available in print at PSE Library, call no. TK2901 .C75 1995
Available in Print at PSE Library, call no. TK2901 .H36 2011
Sources for government sponsored research
NTRL (National Technical Reports Library) is from the National Technical Information Service (NTIS). NTRL indexes government-sponsored research, development and technical reports and provides full-text access to reports that have been digitized.
Search NASA reports, NACA documents and selected non-NASA archives in the fields of aeronautics, space science, chemistry and materials, engineering, geosciences, life sciences, mathematics and computer sciences, and physics.
- Defense Technical Information Center (STINET)
Bibliographic citations for Department of Defense (DOD)reports from 1974 to the present available in the STINET’s Scientific and Technical Documents database. Includes selected full-text reports. Also search the DOD Specifications and Standards database and link to full-text copies.
Theses and Dissertations
How to find UC and non-UC ECE dissertations
Individual UCD ECE dissertations and masters theses are cataloged in the Library of Catalog — search for “Dissertations Academic University of California Davis electrical engineering”
This page describes how to locate and access UCD titles.
- Proquest Dissertation Abstracts International/ Dissertations & Theses (also known as ProQuest Digital Dissertations)
The Dissertation Abstracts International (DAI) database is the authoritative source for finding doctoral dissertations and master’s theses. It also provides access to the full-text of all dissertations from University of California campuses since the late 1990s
Dissertations & theses from 31 USA colleges & universities, including Ohio State University, Rochester Institute of Technology, and North Carolina State University. This is a small subset of published dissertations & theses, but does include some that are not indexed elsewhere. Use in conjunction with other databases such as Dissertations & Theses and PQDT Open.
OATD.org aims to be the best possible resource for finding open access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world.
PQDT Open provides the full text of open access dissertations and theses free of charge.
You can ask Me for help if you experience any problems accessing a dissertation or thesis in print or online.
Professional Societies
A list of professional society home pages related to electrical engineering
The following is a list of professional trade societies related to electrical engineering. Note: The links below simply take you to the homepage, not their publications. To access society publications see the ‘Where to Start’ page.
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Societies & Technical Councils
Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) [formed by a merger of the IEE and IIE]
Style Guides and Managing Citations
How to Cite in IEEE Format
- IEEE Editorial Style Manual (2017) (citing references begins on page 34)
Also see Citation Guides: This guide describes what a publication citation is and provides information on the most common disciplinary styles — MLA, APA, Chicago, CSE and more.
Managing Citations
The campus has a licensed subscription to Endnote, which is a bibliographic manager program that is available as software and as a web-based version. Many people use Endnote because of its compatibility with Microsoft Word. The libraries offer help and classes on Endnote.
Who is Citing Who in ECE?
Doing a cited reference search in science and engineering
Doing a cited reference search answers the question: who has cited a particular author or paper? Knowing this can help you find related papers to the one you have, and help determine how well-known a particular author or paper is in a field.
Also see the Guide: Cited Reference Searching: Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
The main database that offers cited reference search is Web of Science:
Web of Science(WOS)
“Web of Science” was the first database to offer cited reference searching. You can use it to look up an author or a specific work and find out how many articles in the database have this author or work in their footnotes/reference.
Note: Our subscription to Web of Science includes Book Citation Index to the footnotes of books or essays published in books after 2005. Also keep in mind, Web of Science does not index every journal in every field, only a selection of what it regards as core titles.
See this short video (~3 mins) to learn more about WoS cited reference searches
Instructions:
This short video (~5 mins) gives an overview and tips on how to do author and cited work searches
- On the home page of Web of Science, select Cited Reference Search
- Enter a name in the Cited Author field- this can be tricky. Start by the author’s name (last name [space, no comma] first initial *). Add the cited work and/or year the item you are interested in was published.
- Click “search.” You then see a list titled “Cited Reference Index.” Each line refers to a work that matches your search criteria. The same work may be referenced in several lines because of slight differences in the data (different cited pages for example.) The number at the start of each line is the number of times that reference has been cited in other works.
- Check the boxes in front of all relevant lines and click “Finish Search.” This generates a list of articles that cite one or more of the items you selected.