ME 615 Advanced Mechanical Vibrations

Welcome to your ME 615 Design Project Research Guide.

I have designed this guide to help you with your project -- here you will find resources and strategies to find useful and authoritative information used by professional engineers in the field.

Your projects are too varied and interesting to include every possible resource here -- So, please consider me a member of your team -- get in touch by email (jl2339@njit.edu) or schedule an appointment at any stage of the process from starting your literature review to formatting citations.

Consult this page regularly for updates and additional resources as your projects develop.

Jill

Photo: Tetzemann, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Strategies for Success: 

Find a good review article

Most library databases give the option to limit your results to review articles. Review articles give a narrative description, and often an evaluative description, of the research done on a specific topic. 

Here are two examples of review articles:

A comprehensive review of vibration energy harvesting: Modeling and realization

Harvesting Vibration Energy: Technologies and Challenges

Use citation databases to your advantage

Once you've identified a key article, you can see how other researchers have used that article. Scopus and Google Scholar are two places to see who has cited a particular article.

Use controlled vocabulary to your advantage

Once you've identified a really good article, see if you can find "Keywords" to use in a new search. These are often author-supplied terms that get re-used in other articles. 

Do multiple searches in multiple resources

Don't limit yourself to just google scholar or just one library database. Try at least 3.

Use search syntax to your advantage

Consult our research guide Searching Syntax Using Boolean Operators. Searching is all about guessing the words someone else used to write about your topic.

Stay organized with a citation manager

Zotero is Jill Lagerstrom's personal favorite -- see the Zotero Online Tutorial to get started. You can learn more about citations and citation managers on the Understanding Citations Research Guide.