Andreas Birk's Website

Looking for EECS literature at IUB?

When you are writing a report or doing guided research or a seminar or you are simply interested in a topic, you will find that literature on that topic is often much more useful than some obscure websites that you find with google. Of course googling around on a particular topic can not hurt but you will find that real literature is much more reliable, detailed and exhaustive. A large bibliography and proper citations are hence appreciated (if not strictly required) for seminars, reports, theses and so on. Some info on how to do proper citations is given in the "Seminar Survival Guidelines".

But what is "real" literature? Websites are not. Publications, i.e., books, journal articles and conference papers are. So, how to get access to them at IUB?

The IRC

The library aka IRC of IUB is of course the obvious place to look for books, journals and conference proceedings. The selection for EECS is already pretty good and it is getting better and better. It is expected that you are familiar with the IRC anyway. It is in general a good idea to start any literature search with checking if there are any relevant books or journal articles available there.

The IRC catalog can be searched at http://iubcat.iu-bremen.de/ for books and at http://www2.tdnet.com/iub/ for journal articles.

Online Resources

There are also quite some good online resources that should be preferred over just googling. Some of them are actually part of the IRC-services, i.e., IUB pays to have access to the digital versions of publications. These services are typically tied to a specific range of IP-addresses, i.e., they are accessible from any computer within the IUB network. Some resources are publicly available.

• IEEE Xplore
  • http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/advsearch.jsp
  • the ultimate source for EE and robotics publications, very good for CS
  • very good search engine
  • full text access (i.e., you have access to an incredible nice digital library)
  • all IEEE journal articles and conference papers
  • access from all computers within the IUB network (not from the outside; IUB has to pay for this digital library)
  • easy to do proper citations of the publications
• ACM Portal
  • http://portal.acm.org/portal.cfm
  • good source for CS, but also quite some EE and robotics publications
  • easy to do proper citations of the publications
  • unfortunately no full text access (only some publications can be directly downloaded as PDF)
  • to get a publication, it has to be ordered via the InterLibraryLoan ILL (http://iubcat.iu-bremen.de/screens/ill.html) of the IRC
• NEC Citeseer
  • http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/
  • a huge collection of EECS papers that are (automatically) collected from the web and indexed
  • big advantage: all papers are available as full text
  • big disadvantage: you have to check what is a "real" publication and what is not
  • to do proper citations of these papers, do NOT use the citeseer bibtex entry, but find the proper reference where the paper appeared. This can be done for example at http://www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/hylib/en/kvk.html based on a search via author(s) and title of the paper. This is at the same time a check whether the paper is a "real" publication or not.
• Science Citation Index (SCI)
  • http://isi3.isiknowledge.com/portal.cgi?DestApp=WOS&Func=Frame
  • the source of information on how "important" publications are
  • lists publications and how often they are cited from "prestigious" sources
  • covers all scientific fields

How to get a publication via a plain text reference

Often, you have a paper that makes a reference to a publication and you want to get this publication. There are several options

• It is an IEEE publication. Then go to IEEE Xplore at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/advsearch.jsp.
• Check the IRC catalog at http://iubcat.iu-bremen.de/ for books and at http://www2.tdnet.com/iub/ for journal articles.
• Google the titel of the paper and the author(s). Often publications are online. You can even email the author(s) and ask for a digital copy.
• Use the InterLibraryLoan ILL (http://iubcat.iu-bremen.de/screens/ill.html) of the IRC. Note that you need to provide some detailed information to get your paper. If some of it (e.g. the ISSN) is missing in your reference, you can use for example http://www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/hylib/en/kvk.html to trace it based on author(s) and title.