Biomedical Engineering

The two best places to start your search for articles in this subject are general STEM databases - Scopus and Web of Science. (Scopus is easier to use for most people). They will find journals and conference papers from many publishers, so it's generally best to start there unless you are looking for something very specific.

If you only want peer-reviewed journal articles, you'll need to filter your results after you search (on the left hand side of the screen).

Another great resource is PubMed, which is specifically focussed on health sciences. It doesn't include as many papers in biomedical engineering as the first two, but it does offer more powerful  human indexing which will return more relevant results, especially for topics that have a link to medicine or clinical care.

Pro tip: If you want an overview of recent research on a topic, instead of an original research report, you can look for 'review articles' on your topic. In Scopus and Web of Science, the easiest way to find these is to filter by 'document type' on the left-hand side of the page after you do a search. One popular journal is the Annual Reviews of Biomedical Engineering.

Pro tip: In PubMed, the indexing terms (tags) given to each article are called 'MeSH terms'. Using them can help you find relevant articles that don't use the terms you're familiar with already. You can search using MeSH terms when you've already started searching, by looking at the bottom of the PubMed page for an article. Or you can start by using Advanced Search and selecting 'Mesh Terms' as the field. For more help, see this uO research guide for PubMed, or this Youtube video.

In engineering and science, the main way that researchers communicate their work is through journal articles. What distinguishes a journal article from other information you might find?

• They usually describe research (experiments, fieldwork, simulations) that the authors did themselves.
• They are (in a proper journal) peer-reviewed - this means that other skilled researchers have reviewed the article before it was made available. This process can take 6-18 months.
• They are very detailed and advanced because they are usually intended for other researchers in a small field. As a result, they may be hard to fully understand even if you are a student in the same discipline.
• They cite many other articles and documents.

Here is an example of a journal article by a uOttawa graduate student in engineering.

Researchers also use conference papers to share their research more quickly. These are not really peer-reviewed, though there is some screening.

When you use a research database, you will get much better results if you prepare a structured search rather than just entering a few words. See this help guide for an explanation of how to do this.

The key is doing a preliminary internet search to come up with useful synonyms, or similar terms. For example, ff you are looking for papers comparing methods of AI-based processing of photos for detecting potential skin cancers, an good structured search to use in a database would be

     ( "skin cancer"  OR  melanoma )  AND 

     (image* OR photograph)  AND 

    *processing  AND 

    ( "neural network"  OR  "deep learning" )