Robertson Library at UPEI provides access to Inspec through EBSCOhost. Although it is possible to search across multiple databases on EBSCOhost, it is suggested that you limit your search to one database at a time to allow for the maximum number of search fields.
Subject coverage:
physics, electrical/electronic engineering, computing, control engineering, information technology, production, manufacturing and mechanical engineering. Inspec also has significant coverage in areas such as materials science, oceanography, nuclear engineering, geophysics, biomedical engineering and biophysics.
Size:
Inspec contains 15 million bibliographic records from 4600 active journals and more than 2500 conference proceedings per year. Inspec goes back to 1969. Inspec is up-dated weekly and is growing at the rate of over 840,000 records each year. The Inspec Archive contains 873,700 records and covers from 1898-1968.
Search:
by any of the fields, including title, author, author affiliation, Inspec controlled term, uncontrolled terms, numerical indexing, chemical indexing, astronomical object indexing, etc.
Limit by:
publication type, language, source, country of publication, linked full text, treatment type, year or range of years, IPC Section or Inspec Classification
Sort by:
relevance, date, author or source
Phrase search:
to guarantee that the phrase is an exact match, quotation marks should be used, e.g. "dipole moment"
Truncation:
* will retrieve an unlimited number of characters, e.g. manag* will pick up manage, manager, managers, managerial, etc.
? will substitute a single character, e.g. wom?n will pick up either woman or women
# will retrieve zero or one character, e.g. flavo#r
Refine Search:
Search results can be refined using facets on the right of the results
Additional Services:
You can email, print, save to folder, or download results to a bibliographic utility such as EndNote.
EBSCOhost will automatically run your search each week and send any new updates directly to you via email or RSS (click on "share" and then email or RSS).
Additional Information:
For more detailed information and documentation about Inspec please see:http://www.theiet.org/resources/inspec/support/docs/index.cfm
The Inspec Database on the EBSCOhost platform: subject search examples
This is the first of two videos showing Inspec search examples on the EBSCOhost platform. This video demonstrates how using Inspec’s subject indexing may be used to refine and retrieve results that closely match the searcher’s requirements. The different search options are reviewed including how to refine your search and use Inspec keywords, classification codes and IPC (International Patent Classification) codes to produce accurate results.
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The Inspec Database on the EBSCOhost platform: author, affiliation and other special searches
This is the second of two videos showing Inspec search examples on the EBSCOhost platform. This video demonstrates how to carry out effective searches for authors, author affiliations, conference and source information, publication types, language, treatment codes and keywords in publication titles.
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This guide provided courtesy of The IET.
Contact engineering librarian Rosie Le Faive for more information about this resource.