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Indexing Tools

Indexing Tools for SE

The international professional computing organizations ACM and IEEE (IEEE Xplore) both index all articles published in their journals and conference proceedings.

SCOPUS is a particularly useful digital search engine since it indexes articles published by all the main scientific publishing companies (including Elsevier, Kluwer, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell), and the main professional organizations (including the ACM, IEEE). It has one of the best interfaces for performing complex searches using keywords linked by Boolean algebra terms. For example, search for articles of a specific topic (with alterative equivalent labels linked by Boolean OR’s) that are also (AND) review articles (which is a generic terms for SRs, mapping studies and tertiary studies) AND published in a specific discipline (e.g., Computer Science) or appear in specific journals. It also has good support for citation analysis (including forward and backwards snowballing). However, we should note that SCOPUS is not freely available (if you are thinking of using it, check with your library whether it has a subscription).

Google Scholar is a good source for technical reports and white papers that are not formally published (referred to as “grey literature”) and will often identify pre-published drafts of journal and conference articles that are not published as open access articles.

DBLP is particularly useful if you want to track the published research of specific authors.

Search Engines

The following links will take you to the main academic search engines used in Computing.

For details of tools used in other phases and other disciplines, go to Links to other sites.

This page was last updated in August 2023.