A Whole New Look for Engineering Village

Engineering Village is a subscription platform created by Elsevier that allows users to search a variety of important patent and non-patent literature (NPL) databases, including Compendex and Inspec.   Engineering Village is updated on a fairly regular basis to incorporate new features onto the platform, and according to the Major Recent Updates section on its System Report, Engineering Village was last updated in June 2011.  The June 2011 update added new features like Author Detail links from from Compendex and Inspec articles to the SciVerse Scopus Author Profile/Preview page for each author and IPC codes added to Inspec records.  The addition of IPC codes to Inspec records is a particularly useful new search option for patent searchers, who can now search for NPL records corresponding to a specific IPC code assigned to a target patent.  The link to author profile pages on Scopus adds more interoperability between the Engineering Village and SciVerse hub platforms, which are both created by Elsevier.

Another update to Engineering Village is slated to occur near the end of July, and this update seems to focus on making the homepage and search results page more user-friendly and customizable.  The update also adds small but important new features like search terms highlighted in an article and the option to add additional search fields on the Quick Search page.  Read on to  learn about the planned improvements to the Engineering Village interface, and how these updates may affect your non-patent literature searches!

What’s New with Compendex?

  Over at Intellogist, the System Report on the non-patent literature database Compendex has been fully updated. Compendex is an electronic version of the Engineering Index, a printed record of technological information dating back to 1884.  The database is produced by Elsevier Engineering Information, Inc. (Ei), and the file is available on a number of platforms, including Engineering Village, Dialog, STN, and Ovid. The non-patent literature available on Compendex includes reports, books and monographs, conferences, symposia, meetings, journal articles, and book reviews covering 190 specific engineering disciplines.

Continue reading to learn about some of the recent updates available on Compendex, including an updated thesaurus, author profiles, a new search platform, and advanced copies of journal articles!

Track down articles your colleagues can’t find

When I was new to searching, I sometimes had the habit of deleting seemingly meaningless document identifier numbers out of literature abstracts I found.  Now I know that these numbers play an important role in locating the print and/or full text version of those documents, and I always save them.

It’s good practice to keep a record of these numbers, especially if the non-patent literature was found through an abstract-only database like Compendex or Inspec.   Read on to learn more about document identifiers, and how they can give you the edge in document retrieval.