Research guides: Fire Research: Find Journal Articles and Conference Papers

Why You Want Journal Articles and Conference Papers

Journal articles are highly focused sources of information and disseminate information faster than books.The big thing to look for is the peer-review process in which the article is commented on by other researchers before it is published.

The Search and Find Process

A proper search is usually more than typing a couple of words in a search box. Factors affecting what you get back involve spelling, use of quotation marks, synonyms. You often need to look critically at the results you get and try again. Some guides that can help are:

Search Tips to get you started
Avoid Plagiarism,or How to Successfully use the Works of Others
Evaluating Information Sources
Zotero Reference Management software, a tool to help export database results, gather and organize citations, and easily generating in-text citations, footnotes, reference lists, and bibliographies.

Engineering

FireDoc from the National Institute of Standards and Technology
FireDoc is an online database that contains 80,000 holdings (published reports, journal articles, conference proceedings, books, and audio/visual items) of building and fire research materials from many sources.
Fire Safety Journal
Fire Safety Journal is the leading publication dealing with all aspects of fire safety engineering. Its scope is purposefully wide, as it is deemed important to encourage papers from all sources within this multidisciplinary subject, thus providing a forum for its further development as a distinct engineering discipline. This is an essential step towards gaining a status equal to that enjoyed by the other engineering disciplines.

Beyond Engineering

Scopus

Peer-reviewed literature from scientific journals, books and conference proceedings, covering the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities.
Coverage: 1966 - present

Appropriate use guidelines for electronic resources
Web of Science

Articles and citations in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities.
Coverage: Varies

Web of Science is comprised of several databases. The Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI) covers journals in the medical, physical and natural sciences, and engineering fields. The entire database extends back to 1899. The Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) covers journals in the social sciences. The entire database extends back to 1898. The Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) covers journals in the arts and humanities. It also selectively covers relevant items from science and technical journals. The entire database extends back to 1975.
Appropriate use guidelines for electronic resources

Directory of Research Guides by Subject
These are prepared by subject librarians as beginning guides to research in a variety of disciplines or for specific classes.
Directory of Research Databases
These are subject lists of the various research databases (abstracts & indexes, ejournal or ebook aggregations) available to the University of Waterloo Library users.
Google Scholar
Google has filtered much of non-scholarly material out of this database. This interface is set up to use the GetIt!@Waterloo functionality.

After You Have Finished Your Graduate Program

After you finish your graduate diploma in mechanical engineering, some of the electronic access privileges to the Library resources will be cut off. The institution where you work may have subscribed to the resources that you are looking for.

To get copies of articles, you could try your local public library and ask about its interlibrary loan (ILL) service. It works best if you have complete and accurate information about what you are looking for. You may want to verify the bibliographic information of your source in one of the databases below:

FireDoc from the National Institute of Standards and Technology
FireDoc is an online database that contains 80,000 holdings (published reports, journal articles, conference proceedings, books, and audio/visual items) of building and fire research materials from many sources.
Google Scholar
Google has filtered much of non-scholarly material out of this database.

Research guides by subject

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