CECM 676: Construction Project Risk Management Searching Compendex

The Compendex database contains citations and abstracts primarily for journal articles and conference papers in Engineering and related fields.  It also includes information on some books and book chapters, dissertations, patents (pre-1970), reports, and standards. While this page is specifically dedicated to searching in Compendex, the process and tips described here will be very similar to those you'll need for other academic databases!

Begin by clicking the Compendex link on the Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering databases page.  [Note: If you are using Compendex off-campus, after you click the link you will be prompted to enter your BlazerID and password before you can access the database.]

Depending on how complex your subject is, you can use the default single search box or you can add more search boxes to use multiple search terms at the same time.

There are lots of ways to search Compendex (and other databases)!

• You can simply type in some key words and search All fields for those terms, but that can leave you with a lot of results that may not be exactly aligned with what you were hoping for.
• You can change the search fields to the left of the box you'll type your search terms into to Subject/Title/Abstract, which will only return results that have your terms located in those specific parts of the items your search returns. 
• Regardless of whether you're searching for your terms in All fields or Subject/Title/Abstract, you can place quotation marks around your phrases to find results that have those words in that exact order and position. You can also use Boolean terms like AND to connect the terms and phrases that make up your search
• For more tips, you can check out the UAB Libraries guide on advanced searching!

The results page will show you, among other things...

1. how many records your search found
2. how the results are sorted. 
3. how many records are currently displayed on each page of the results.

To change the number of records displayed, click the accompanying arrow (you can display 25, 50, or 100 records).  To change the sorting, click the accompanying arrow (in addition to relevance, you can sort by date -- newest records first or oldest records first).

You can also narrow your results by choosing some refining options from the left bar on the results page. Two great options are

1. narrowing your Document type to journal articles and conference articles. Unless you're specifically looking for dissertations, these two article types are most likely to give you the most recent results.
2. using Controlled vocabulary that will narrow your results by adding additional terms to your search parameters.
3. clicking View more under any of these categories will give you a much longer list of suggestions.

Not shown in this image, you can also scroll further down to find the option to narrow your results by publication date, which can help you find resources that have been published within the last 12 months, for example.

When you click on the item's title, you should be able to see lots of information about the article, including title, authors, publication information, and the abstract of the article. If the abstract convinces you that you'd like to read the full paper, click the "Full Text @ UAB Libraries" button in the top left.

If we have access to the item, the databases you can find the article in will be listed under View Online - Full text availability. If not, you can request a copy of the item through our interlibrary loan service, which is a completely free service that will request a PDF of the article from other libraries in our network!