Welcome to the research guide for ME 404 & 496 - the Mechanical Engineering Capstone courses! Below you'll find advice and links to help you find great sources of information for your capstone project research, including links to our various search tools for books and ebooks, suggestions for the best databases to use for capstone research, and links to DoD and Federal Government agencies which can provide information and data useful to your project.
Once you've acquired background information on your topic - important names, dates, events - it's time to turn to subject-specific databases in order to find detailed scholarly articles that provide a more in-depth and focused analysis for your capstone project. Below are links to databases that include articles which address a variety of Mechanical Engineering topics that relate to capstone projects.
When searching for information on your capstone project, start by searching for keywords related to your topic in Scout. Books, ebooks, newspaper articles, and journal articles found using Scout will provide both background and detailed information on your topic.
US Army Corps of Engineers, at http://www.usace.army.mil/Pages/default.aspx : the Web Headquarters of the Army Corps of Engineers, with information about the Agency, its mission and work, and services to the public and the military.
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Scientific and Technical Information: free public access to over 230,000 full-text documents and bibliographic citations of the Office of Scientific Information research report literature from 1991 to present, covering physics, chemistry, materials, biology, environmental sciences, energy technologies, engineering, computer & information science, renewable energy, and other topics of interest related to DOE's mission.
Selected Internet Resources - Engineering - A compilation of engineering resources from around the web, at http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/selected-internet/engineering.html
http://www.ntis.gov/ - The National Technical Information Service's National Technical Reports Library (NTRL), which collects the results of federally funded research. Open to all for search and discovery; requires free registration for access to full-text documents.
http://www.nist.gov/index.html - The National Institute of Standards and Technology is one of the nation's oldest physical science laboratories. Explore research and standards in a wide variety of subject areas.
https://www.army.mil/call - The Center for Army Lessons Learned collects, analyzes, disseminates, and archives lessons and best practices while maintaining global situational awareness in order to share knowledge and facilitate the Army's and Unified Action Partners' adaptation to win wars.
