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Industrial Engineering: Technical Communication 311

Welcome

Welcome to the Technical Communication 311 library guide.
This guide provides training material and additional information that may help you with your assignment.

Where to find credible sources for your assigment

  • Library Catalogue
    Find books (print and electronic) as well as peer-reviewed articles.
  • Scopus
    A comprehensive database of peer-reviewed literature.
    Training material
  • Engineering Village: Compendex
    An interdisciplinary engineering and applied science database. Apart from all the engineering disciplines, coverage includes applied physics, astronomy, bioengineering, biotechnology,
    materials science and nanotechnology
  • IEEE Xplore
    The IEEE Xplore digital library provides access to scientific and technical content published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and its publishing partners. The content covers electrical engineering, computer science, biotechnology, telecommunications, power and energy, and electronics.
  • Knovel
    Scientific and engineering handbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries
  • Access Engineering
    An engineering reference and teaching platform that provides access to the latest editions of renowned engineering handbooks and textbooks.
  • Google Scholar
    With Google Scholar you can search across many disciplines and sources for scholarly literature. Consult the Google and Google Scholar Libguide for guidelines on how to use Google Scholar effectively.

Boolean operators AND / OR / NOT

AND – returns results with both keywords. AND usually limits the search results
OR – returns results with one or the other keyword.It broadens your results by connecting two or more synonyms.
NOT – returns results excluding specific keywords

Use the Boolean Machine for visualizing the effects of Boolean operators .

More tips:

Quotation Marks “ ” – keep keywords together, for exact phrase searching
Brackets ( ) – keep concepts together, used for synonyms

Example:

("green energy" OR "sustainable energy" OR "renewable energy") AND (logistics OR "supply chain")

Analyzing URLs

A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is a web address for a page or document on the World Wide Web. We can make some educated guesses about the reliability of a web site if we know a little about URLs. 

Each URL (for example http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/internships), consists of an access protocol (http), a domain name (www.whitehouse.gov), and an optional path to a file or resource residing on that server (about/internships).

The domain name indicates the organization responsible for the site (www.whitehouse.gov in the example above). The top-level domain indicates the type of site (gov in the example above).

The most common top-level domains and the type of site they indicate are:

  • com     commercial business or for-profit organizations
  • co.za   commercial South Africa
  • gov      United States government agencies
  • gov.za   government South Africa
  • edu      educational institutions
  • ac        academic institutions
  • mil       United States military organizations
  • org       non-profit organizations

In general, .gov and .edu web sites are more reliable than .com web sites.

Evaluate information

When doing research, it is important to use a variety of sources such as books, articles from newspapers, magazines or journals, and websites. Always make sure that the information you use is reliable and appropriate for your assignment

The resources provided by the library are usually peer-reviewed and trustworthy, but when using information that can be accessed through using general search engines, you need to be cautious, as most websites do not undergo peer review. 

To ensure you are including only valid information in your research, evaluate your sources using the criteria provided in this LibGuide.

Evaluate websites

RADAR test