Database Guide - Knovel

Knovel provides accessible and relevant engineering answers and insights. Data can be interpreted or analysed to answer a specific question, allowing users to build expertise in various subjects and solve engineering problems quickly.

It is used in industry to enhance research and productivity and is therefore helpful to students in preparing for a career in engineering. Engineering Newsfeed allows users to keep up to date with the latest news from prominent engineering sources.

Learn more about how Knovel is used by engineers through educational videos

The following videos provide examples of how you might use Knovel for a specific assignment – designing a bike or beer brewing:

Design a bicycle with Knovel

Knovel in the classroom: Beer Brewing

• To access Knovel, go to LibrarySearch
• Log in using your CCCU username and password. If you are away from campus, or connecting with your own device over Wi-Fi, you will need to include @canterbury.ac.uk after your CCCU username [username@canterbury.ac.uk] as well as your normal CCCU password.
• Select Find Databases A-Z, click on K, then click on the link to Knovel to open it in a new tab.
•  

Use the Search option in Knovel, located at the top of the homepage and most Knovel pages, to search for:

• Books
• Chapters
• Conference Proceedings
• Databases
• Dictionaries
• Encyclopaedias
• Engineering Cases
• Equations
• Graphs
• Mathcad
• Regulatory Information
• Tables

You may limit your search to a particular field or type of content before you type anything in the search box by using the Pre-filter Search Bar drop-down.

Advanced Search allows you to specify one or more pieces of information from across fields (Title, Author, Publisher) and/or use the Free-text search box.

To search interactive content (tables and graphs) by material or substance, property, or a combination of the two, conduct a more targeted search using Material Property Search.

More guidance on using Knovel can be found in the Knovel libguide

Resources and videos showing how to use Knovel include:

• Knovel overview
• Search in Knovel
• Material property search
• Knovel interactive equations

You can see two videos for CCCU students on finding data in Knovel for chemical and mechanical engineering further down in this guide

Try searching Knovel by following the steps outlined below. This will help you to familiarise yourself with some of the most common functions:

1. Try searching across Knovel for “wind power” or an engineering concept of your choice. You can select from autosuggest terms (based on engineering concepts) as you start typing.
2. How many results did you find? Notice that the results are automatically sorted by relevancy, but you can change this to sort by copyright or publication date if you wish.
3. Think about how you can refine your results to ensure they are right for you. You might want to refine by content type, to view just book chapters or encyclopaedia entries, for example.
4. You might want to refine by industry, such as manufacturing or construction.
5. Take a look at the Authors list. Can you identify the authors who have written the most about this subject? You might want to explore their work further using Author Search.
6. Find an interesting book chapter from your results list and click to access the full-text.
7. Return to the Knovel homepage and select Material Property Search.
8. Search for stainless steel from the main search box.
9. You can now search for up to three properties for stainless steel. Search for corrosion in the Find any property search box.
10. Select corrosion potential from the list of results and drag into the central pane.
11. Click on the Table/Graph Results to view tables which contain information about the corrosion potential of stainless steel.

Knovel has been tested against the publisher Elsevier's accessibility checklist. This requires Knovel to conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), an international set of accessibility guidelines developed by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), the governing body of the Web.

For accessibility information for this resource, please see Elsevier's accessibility webpage or contact accessibility@elsevier.com

Your Learning and Research Librarian will be able to help you make the best use of online resources. For detailed guidance, book a tutorial via the Learning Skills Hub.