Melinda M Livas
Student Services
Student Services Librarian
530-752-5248
Your topic should be something that interests you!
If you don’t already have a topic, you can look at popular engineering and science articles to get some ideas. Here are some good sources to help get you started:
General Science:
Engineering:
BrowZine visually presents the library’s e-journals in a browsable and readable format with seamless synchronization across devices. Includes a My Bookshelf feature which enables users to add their favorite titles and receive notification of newly published articles (including articles in press). Articles can be saved to My Articles for reading and referencing later.
Peer Review, also known as Refereed.
Peer-reviewed literature is scholarly/ academic research that is reviewed by one or more experts (i.e. peers) in addition to the editor before being accepted for publication.
Peer-Reviewed vs. Scholarly/ Academic
Not all scholarly literature is peer-reviewed. Scholarly literature is written by experts in the field and is typically published in academic journals. However, the editor reviews the article to decided publication- there is no peer review.
Trade and Professional Publications
Trade and professional literature resembles scholarly literature in that it is written by experts in the field (e.g. specialized journalists or technical writers). Its main purpose is to convey information to other members of the profession or trade. Articles in trade and professional journals will be more like news stories, reports on research, events, and opinions. Also, they are often published by the professional/trade associations for the field.
Popular, News, or General Interest Publications
Popular literature tends to be written by journalists for magazines and newspapers. Newsweek and New York Times are considered popular literature.
How to Identify Peer-Reviewed Articles:
A selection of databases (many from the Proquest platform) will include a checkbox to limit to “Peer Reviewed” articles. For journals retrieved from other databases, use the online Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory to locate your journal and then look for the black symbol indicating the publication is “Refereed.”
Clarivate Analytics Journal Citation Reports is a comprehensive tool for assessing the importance of research journals in disciplines and sub-disciplines including medical specialties.
NOTE that *review* journals may often be listed as top-ranked titles, taking space away from original research titles, so use with caution. Typical review series may have the following words in their title: Advances in … ; Annual Review of …; Critical Reviews in … ; Current Opinion in … ; Expert Reviews in … ; International Review of … ; Progress in … ; Trends in …
Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is an annual publication by Thomson Reuters with each yearly data analysis being completed in the summer of the following year. JCR indicates: most frequently cited journals in a field: highest impact journals in a field; and largest journals in a field. JCR Science Edition contains data from over 7,300 journals in science and technology. JCR Social Sciences Edition contains data from over 2,200 journals in the social sciences. NOTE: For disciplines that have longer timespans for citation, consider sorting for ranking by using the 5-year Impact Factor sort.
Release Coverage: 1997-2016 (for 1996-2015 data)
•Impact Factors in Wikipedia: validity, manipulation, and misuse of Impact Factors
•Using JCR Wisely
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.
UC Library Search connects all 10 University of California campuses through a unified discovery and borrowing system. At UCD, our researchers can also search the collections of Mabie Law Library, which is part of the School of Law.
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)
Feel free to 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 UC Library Search.
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.
Professional societies are great sources for information. They sponsor conferences and publish journals, proceedings, and books. They set professional and educational standards and provide job and career services for their members.
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.
Using Endnote, citations can be stored, searched, and quickly inserted into research papers in the format of many scholarly journals. Endnote makes identifying and formatting citations for publications a breeze. Check out the Endnote@UCDavis page for more information such as loading software, instructional videos, library endnote workshops, and more.
EndNote is citation management software that allows you to store, manage, and format bibliographic citations, and easily change formatting of citations in Word documents. Available, and free to UC Davis students, faculty & staff (campus has a site license).
Two versions are available:
These subject guides created by UCD librarians are intended to provide an introduction to finding information in a variety of engineering subjects. They include a selective list of reference books, encyclopedias, and handbooks, as well as suggested databases for finding articles.
Engineering : This guide is intended to provide an introduction to finding information in Engineering. Please see more specific subject guides below for specific engineering disciplines.