ESE 112 Course Guide

This page is designed to help you to locate, evaluate and use the resources you will need for your lab assignment in ESE 112.

Prelab

Encyclopedias
AccessScience
The resource includes both an encyclopedia and a dictionary. Includes 7,000+ articles from McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology and the 110,000+ definitions from the Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms. Articles include illustrations and bibliographies.

Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia
This well-known encyclopedia contains more than 10,000 entries contributed by industry experts and scholars worldwide.

Wiley Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering
The Wiley Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering is a unique, comprehensive reference work that defines the entire discipline, bringing together the core knowledge from every one of the many specialties encompassed by electrical and electronics engineering.
Dictionaries
McGraw-Hill Electronics Dictionary
This sixth edition features more than 14,000 entries including 800 new terms and definitions, covering such fast-growing subject areas as personal computers, digital telecommunications, cellular telephony, and consumer electronics.

Newnes Dictionary of Electronics
Provides clear and concise definitions, supported by numerous illustrations and circuit diagrams.

Lab

Evaluating Sources
- Authoritative resources are defined as follows for the purposes of this assignment:
  - Written by scholars or researchers in the field or discipline. Please consider their credentials including educational degrees, occupation/position, and record of other publications in the field.
  - Published in a peer-reviewed journal or a conference sponsored by a scientific organization or society.
  - Contains references to sources in the form of citations
- Peer review is the evaluation process that some articles undergo before they are published in scientific journals. The quality, accuracy and utility of a peer-reviewed article have been evaluated by experts in the field. If you would like to know whether a journal is peer-reviewed, you can check Ulrich's Periodicals Index. Peer-reviewed journals will include an icon that looks like a referee's jersey. This information may also be available on the journal's website under "About" or "Instructions to authors."
- How to Evaluate Sources
  
  This is a page with the criteria and strategies for evaluating sources for this project.

Resources
Compendex Database

Compendex allows you to search for journal articles, conference papers, trade magazine articles and technical reports covering all areas of engineering and applied science.

Inspec Database

Inspec allows you to search for journal articles, conference papers, technical reports, books and dissertations covering electrical engineering, , electronics, computer science, information technology, robotics, telecommunications and physics.

Search Example for Inspec and Compendex:

Let's try searching for documents on the topic of operational amplifiers.

On the Quick Search tab, type "operational amplifiers" into the "Search For" text box. Use the pull-down arrows on the "Search In" boxes to chose the field(s) you wish to search (e.g. All Fields, Subject/Title/Abstract, etc.).
In this case, since "operational amplifiers" is an official descriptor term in both Inspec and Compendex, you can choose "controlled vocabulary" here. This means that you will get fewer results, but your term will be a main topic in these articles.
Note: Compendex and Inspec will not always use the same descriptor (controlled vocabulary) terms.
Use the "Limit By" options to choose the treatment type. For instance, you could pick General Review (survey paper) for review papers, which summarize the current state of work in a particular field. Such papers are particularly useful for those who are not experts because they provide an overview of the main issues, results, and open questions in that field. Once again, Inspec and Compendex have different options in this menu.
Click "Search." Use the "Sort By" options to have your results listed by date (Publication year) rather than the default option of relevance.
Once you have found a paper of interest, click on the Detailed Record link to view more information about the paper, including the abstract. If you want to read the whole paper, click on the PennText button at the bottom of the page. This will take you to a window that will allow you to access an electronic version of the article (if available), search Franklin for a print copy of the publication in which the paper appeared, or request the paper through Interlibrary Loan.

Inspec and Compendex Tutorial

A guide to using both Inspec and Compendex.

Web of Science (WOS) -also known as ISI Citation Indexes

Multidisciplinary database. Premiere source for citation searching.

Citation Search Example:

For instance, suppose you wished to know what articles had cited the following article: Keskinen, J., Pietarinen, K. & Lehtimaki M (1992). Electrical low-pressure impactor. Journal of Aerosol Science 23(4): 353-360.

Since this is a journal article, you can try looking it up by the title of the article.
If the desired article comes up in the results list, just click on the "Times Cited" number link to get a list of the articles which have cited it. If it does not come up, or if you wish to see if a non-journal item has been cited, follow the instructions below:
- Click on the Cited Reference Search link below the database selection tabs. Enter the author's name, the work's source, and/or publication year.
- Cited Author: Enter the last name followed by the first and middle initials, if known. If you are not sure whether the author consistently used a middle inital, it's best to use the first initial followed by an * (the truncation symbol for Web of Science). In this example, since one of the authors is Keskinen J, we would search using Keskinen J*.
- Cited Work: For the cited item, you will need to use the correct abbreviation. If it is a journal, use the "Journal Abbreviation List" link under the search box to look it up. Journal of Aerosol Science is abbreviated J Aerosol Sci , so that is what we should use for this example search.
  If the cited item is a conference paper, book, etc. rather than a journal article, click on the magnifying glass symbol at the end of the search box to go to a look-up screen. There may be multiple abbreviations for the same item because WOS follows whatever was entered in the citing document's reference list. For this reason, you may prefer to only use author name and year, and browse the results to select all the varying entries that represent the item in which you are interested.
- Cited Year: Use the year the cited item was published, NOT the year it was cited. In this case, it's 1992.
- The results list is called the "Cited Reference Index" and displays entries that match your search. Click the "Show Expanded Titles" link at the top of the "Cited Work" column to view the full document title and, when available, the full article title.
- Choose entries from the results list by selecting the checkbox next to the cited work(s), or use the "Select Page" or "Select All" buttons. Click the "Finish Search" button to retrieve a list of articles that cited the work(s) you selected. You can try to get the full-text of these items by clicking on the PennText button.

Other Useful Resources

IEEE Xplore

Full-text of IEEE journals, transactions, letters, and magazines from 1988 with select content back to 1913; IEEE conference proceedings from 1988 with select content back to 1953; IEEE standards from 1948; IET journals, letters, and magazines from 1988 with select content back to 1965; IET conference proceedings from 1988.
ACM Digital Library
The ACM Digital Library contains the fulltext of journals, magazines, transactions, proceedings, newsletters, and publications by Affiliated Organizations, Special Interest Groups (SIGs) back to 1947.

Citation Style

You will need to list your citations in APA style in a "List of References" at the end of your paper. The following guides can help you to format your citations correctly.

APA Style Guide to Electronic Resources
APA Guide to Bibliographic Reference Style
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association

Engineering Library Reserve

BF76.7 .A46 2001

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