Elsevier Compendex and Google Scholar: A Quantitative Comparison of Two Resources for Engineering Research and an Update to Prior Comparisons Original Research Article

Elsevierʹs Compendex product (and its ancestor, Engineering Index) has been a de rigeur indexing tool for searching the primary literature in engineering for many years. However, the price of Compendex continues to rise while at the same time, broader, lower-cost or even free alternatives to such expensive indexing tools have proliferated. This paper seeks to quantitatively and, to a lesser extent, qualitatively compare Compendex to Google Scholar. In this paper, the author used a combination of methodologies in prior comparisons of both Google Scholar and Compendex to other indexing services and to each other. We undertook a quantitative comparison of the retrieval capabilities of the two indexing tools with the specific aim of examining Googleʹs suitability to be a primary indexing tool for engineering literature. The author also considered additional factors regarding the ease-of-use and ‘added value’ features of the two interfaces.