FEATURE
Engineering
very current research progress reports and results in active and emerging technologies, much of which can’t yet be, or may never be, found in the journals literature,’ explained Pepper of SPIE, which has an extensive programme of conferences and proceedings. IET’s Smith agreed: ‘Current awareness information is more likely to be found in conference proceedings. Engineers do publish journal articles but unless they are in academia that is not really the top priority. Conferences are where people are at the point of revealing where they’ve got to with their work.’ A big trend with conferences recently has been the growth in filming of conferences. ‘We have
IET.tv, with the presentation video and slides side by side, and I expect we’ll integrate this into our offerings going forward. We could possibly also include post-event discussions to help people to collaborate,’ said Smith. Trust built through personal interactions is important. ‘Research we’ve done in the past revealed that the place that engineers go first for information is to talk to their peers,’ he added. With this in mind, IET has started its MyCommunity social network. ‘I think social
tools are going to become quite important. There is a lot of information that is relevant to engineers that has no formal process of peer review. Engineers want to use it but they also want to know if it has value by finding out what their colleagues think,’ he said. ICE Publishing’s
Ramster has observed
similar behaviour: ‘Word of mouth between practitioners and academics is still an incredibly important way to find information. Larger civil engineering companies have strong in-house mentoring programmes and engineers will gain information (knowledge of codes, standards etc) this way. Companies like Arup also have their own in-house magazine,’ he noted.
Patents
Patents also form part of the information landscape for engineers. As Hawkins of IEEE noted, ‘depending on the type of engineer and their professional responsibilities, engineers, particularly those with responsibility for applying for new patents, will cite patents as prior art. Some engineers also make extensive use of information on electronic components and application notes explaining how
particular parts or components work and can be incorporated into other products or systems.’ ‘One of the key objectives [of using patents] is looking at the commercial landscape,’ added IET’s Smith. To help engineers use patents better and to help patent experts use literature for prior art research, the IET and Minesoft have begun to work together on the new Minesoft Inspec platform (see box: ‘Mixing scholarly literature and patents’). ‘The product with Minesoft is about the research
leading to patents. Making that
information available is key,’ explained Smith. Such tools help engineers search for and find information more quickly, an important requirement for their research. ‘A significant proportion of research begins on search engines such as Google or Google Scholar. Other resources such as Microsoft Academic Search are gaining ground. It behoves publishers to ensure that our sites are well covered in these resources,’ observed Pepper of SPIE. Generally, however, engineers move on from such mainstream resources to more specialised engineering resources. One such tool is Knovel, which pulls together engineering materials
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