Engineering Village / Compendex
Elsevier's flagship engineering index.
At a Glance
- Publisher
- Elsevier (Engineering Village is the platform; Compendex is the core database)
- Coverage
28M+ records across all engineering disciplines, journals and conference proceedings, with controlled-vocabulary indexing (Ei Thesaurus)
- Access
institutional subscription
- Free alternative
- OpenAlex, arXiv (eess)
- Regional
global.
Our Take
Compendex is the broadest single engineering index — spanning civil, mechanical, chemical, materials, and beyond — which makes Engineering Village a natural hub for cross-disciplinary engineering reviews where IEEE Xplore’s EE/CS focus is too narrow. Its Ei-controlled vocabulary supports precise, comprehensive searching. It’s subscription-based. Use it as the wide-net engineering index, paired with IEEE Xplore and INSPEC for full discipline coverage and with the relevant preprint servers for recency.
Power Tips
- Use Compendex as the broad engineering net (beyond EE/CS), then layer IEEE Xplore and INSPEC to catch discipline-specific venues
- apply the Ei Thesaurus terms for precision, and export with source tags for auditable multi-database dedup (Issue 3).
Alternatives & Complements
IEEE Xplore · INSPEC · Scopus · Web of Science.
Figures last verified: August 16, 2026