Engineering Source: How Robust is the Coverage of the Engineering Literature?

Citation:

Amy S. Van Epps and Robyn Rosenberg. 6/18/2019. “Engineering Source: How Robust is the Coverage of the Engineering Literature?” In American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference. Tampa, FL: ASEE. Publisher's Version

Abstract:

Background: In June 2013, EBSCO launched Engineering Source, a new database that is touted as the “premier collection of engineering-related content” [1]. The authors encountered this database 5 years after it was released after moving to new institutions, and investigating the engineering resources available. Upon learning about the database, the authors asked a few engineering librarian colleagues, many of whom had also not heard of the database, and none had used it.

Purpose: Given the claim of a premier collection and the lack of knowledge on the part of engineering librarians at flagship engineering schools, the authors decided to do a comparison of the indexing coverage of Engineering Source with Compendex. The goal is to determine how the breadth and depth of coverage in Engineering Source compares to the acknowledged top resource for engineering literature [3].

Scope and Method: The authors elected to use the method developed by Meier and Conkling [2] to compare relative coverage of Google Scholar with Compendex. In this case, the same searches will be completed in Compendex, and a random selection of articles from the results in Compendex will be searched for inclusion in Engineering Source.

Results: The total number of results per subject were smaller for Engineering Source than for Compendex, which is expected just from considering the number of resources included in the databases, as outlined in the indexing scope. An apparent English language bias was found in the content that is indexed by Engineering Source.

Conclusions: For very small schools offering selected engineering disciplines that match the strengths of Engineering Source, it could be a good resource. The inclusion of some full text would also be a strength for schools without the ability to purchase many of these publications. In addition, the ability to do searches across multiple databases on the EbscoHost platform could work really well if complementary information is already in an Ebsco database.

Last updated on 07/25/2019