Conference proceedings and papers are research reports that are first shared in topical meetings of interest to researchers and practioners in a given field of study. Conference proceedings and papers can be important to engineering research in that recent studies and discoveries are often first reported at these meetings.
Major engineering societies such as ACM, AIAA, ASCE, ASME, IEEE, MRS, SAE, and SPIE now have robust digital libraries where they index and deliver papers from their sponsored meetings and conferences. Please find links to the U-M Library access to these digital libraries below.
Also, papers from these societies typically are well-indexed in subscription databases such as Compendex, Inspec, Scopus, and Web of Science.
Please note, however, that your literature search may lead you to proceedings and papers that are published by other engineering societies or that have not been digitized.
Please see the next section for tips on finding proceedings that cannot be found in one of the digital libraries listed below.
Use Library Catalog Search to look for conference papers that cannot be found online.
When searching for conferences, meetings, and symposia in catalog search, accept the default "keyword" search, and then select the less common words found in the conference title to use as search terms.
For instance, suppose you are looking for the 1977 IFAC International Symposium on Information Control Problems in Manufacturing.
When searching for this title, the words "International" and "Symposium" are likely to be too general to be useful search terms. Instead, select less common words, such as "IFAC," "Control," and "Manufacturing." When the year or city where the meeting was held are known, they can sometimes be helpful if added to the search string. If a search that includes year or city returns zero results, try a new search after removing those terms from the search string.
In all cases, when having trouble finding a copy of a conference paper, please ask a librarian for help.