Skip to Main Content

Mechanical Engineering Research Guide

Introductory guide to library research and resources for faculty, staff, and students in mechanical engineering.

Why can't I just use Google?

As a librarian I often get asked this question. Both Google and Google Scholar are good tools, but sometimes they are not the best tool. There are good reasons to learn to use scholarly databases for your research, not just Google and Google Scholar.

Google was built to search web pages.





Google only has basic filtering and search features.

Google does make searching very easy. You just type in the box and get results that include your search terms, even if what you searched for was a natural language sentence rather than a phrase constructed of keywords. You'll often get thousands or millions of results when using Google, and your options for narrowing this down to a usable number of highly relevant results are limited. For example, in Google Scholar you can sort your results by date of publication or "relevance" (as determined by Google's algorithm), and you can limit by publication date.

The library's scholarly databases typically provide you with a much broader array of search and filtering tools. For example, in the engineering database Compendex, you have the option to filter your results based on physical properties discussed in the document, document type, controlled vocabulary terms (subject labels that capture documents that may not use your exact search terms but are still relvant), language, and many other parameters.


Profile Photo
Erin Thomas
150 Parks Library
Iowa State University
515 294-9886