What are the different types of searches?
Last updated on March 26, 2026
Engineering Village offers several ways to search its databases:
- Quick search - designed for quick, basic searching
- Expert search - provides more power and flexibility than Quick search because it incorporates advanced Boolean logic and includes more search options
- Thesaurus search - allows searching of terms indexed for each database so you can identify controlled vocabulary terms, identify synonyms and related terms, and improve your search strategy with suggested and narrower terms
- Numeric search - allows searching of standardized numeric quantities and ranges in Compendex and Inspec records
- Combined search - provides the ability to combine searches stored in the search history
- Author search - provides the ability to search Compendex records via a listing of authors' profiles
- Affiliation search - provides the ability to search Compendex records via a listing of the profiles from authors' affiliations
- Conference series - a centralized place where engineering researchers can discover conference events and proceedings included in Compendex
Additionally, you may search Engineering Village using the Engineering Research Profiles and Inspec Analytics search features.
Enter text for your searches in either lower case or upper case as the Engineering Village interface is not case sensitive.
Visit the Privacy Center for more information about the various privacy options available for your searches for your Elsevier account.
Notes: If you have created an Engineering Village account and have signed in, your search session expires after eight hours of inactivity. You will see an inactivity message after this timeframe that provides a button to restore your session to retain your search history and selected records for seven days.
If you have created an account, (but have not signed in), your search session expires after 30 minutes of inactivity. A message to extend your search session displays on your screen five minutes before your session expires and asks you if you want to sign in and continue your session.
If you have not created an account, your search session expires after 30 minutes of inactivity. A message asks you if you would like to create an account and sign in to extend your session to eight hours and to retain your search history and selected records for seven days. This message will remain on your screen until you confirm that you want to continue or until the session expires.
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