Research Guides: Engineering Research Guide: Beginning Your Research

Exploring a Topic

These resources can help you to refine your topic or familiarize yourself with an issue. They make a great starting point when you have a general idea of a research topic, but you still need to narrow it down.

CQ Researcher
Articles covering controversial issues with summaries, insight into all sides of the issues, bibliographies and more. (coverage since 1991)
Opposing Viewpoints (Gale in Context)
Articles about social issues. Includes opinion articles, topic overviews, statistics, primary documents, and full-text periodical articles from magazines and newspapers. PCC offers a brief video with instructions for using this database.
Science (Gale in Context)
Authoritative information covering all major science topics. Integrates content from encyclopedias and other reference works, as well as topic overviews, biographies, articles from academic journals and other periodicals, images and videos, detailed experiments from Experiment Central, biographies, and dictionaries.
SIRS Issues Researcher (ProQuest)
SIRS Issues Researcher provides insight into the most-studied social issues by delivering the pros and cons from relevant, credible documents and graphics selected from over 2,000 global sources. Leading Issues pages provide a framework for understanding and analyzing over 360 complex social issues with overviews, essential questions, viewpoints, and editorially selected primary and secondary sources.

Featured Reference Material

Statistical Abstract of the United States (ProQuest)
An authoritative and comprehensive collection of statistics on the social, political and economic conditions of the United States. Statistics can be browsed, or searched by keyword and topic.

Engineering Research Guide

Off Campus Log In (Database Access)

Engineering Careers

Exploring a Topic

Featured Reference Material

Statistical Sources