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.
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