Research Skills for Engineering Students

Conference papers include the latest research in the discipline making them a good source of current research.

Compilations of papers presents at conferences are called proceedings. These papers are sometimes the base material for future refereed publications and have already been peer-reviewed.

Conference proceedings can be published as a book or journal article or as a special issue. There are even instances where only the abstract is published. For these reasons it can be challenging to find or identify a paper as a conference proceeding.

Content adapted from: Retrieved August 15, 2023, from UTS Library. (2023). Engineering management: Finding journal articles and conference papers. https://studyguides.lib.uts.edu.au/engineeringmanagement/articles

In many cases when using article databases the paper you find may be tagged with "conference paper." If you are searching specifically for conference papers, you can look for the database to have a filter for conference papers, or add the terms conference and/or proceedings to your search.

In this first example from Compendex, the type of document is highlighted in the information about the article. I can see that these two records are both conference papers. (Note: The highlighted words in the title refer to terms I used in my search).

Here is a second example from UBC Library's catalogue of Proceedings. In the record shown here, note the different terms used to identify conference proceedings such as, "Conference Proceedings," "Conference" and "Congresses." This title is published in a book format with all conference papers collected into one proceeding from the congress held on March 12 - 13, 2012.

Choose one of the engineering databases below and look specifically for conference papers. Is there a filter to make it easier to surface just the conference papers? Or do you have to read through the result list to find conference papers. Look for a conference paper on a topic you're interested in.