Tips on How to Find Conference Papers 

Research is often presented at conferences before it is published in journal articles.  Therefore, the "proceedings" of conferences (i.e., the papers that were presented there) can be a good source of information about what's new in the field.

To find conference proceedings, you can search the JHU Libraries catalog to see whether we own the whole volume, or you can search in a database that indexes the individual papers.  Such databases include Compendex, IEEE Xplore, INSPEC, and SciFinder Scholar.

How to find conference proceedings in the JHU Libraries Catalog

There are some tricks to finding proceedings from conferences, meetings, and symposia in most library catalogs. 

Sometimes complete proceedings are not published and there might be "extended abstracts" or "digests of papers" published instead.  Or, not all the papers that were presented at a conference are published. 
Sometimes papers that are presented at conferences are published in the society's journal after the conference, so it's helpful to be familiar with the society publications in your specific subject area.

Tips for finding proceedings in the library catalog:

1. Use the Advanced Keyword search feature in the catalog.
    
2. If you have it, always search for the proceedings title and not the paper title. 
   
3. If you have it, always search for the proceedings editor and not paper author.
   
4. Try searching the conference location (e.g., Anaheim) along with the organization (e.g., ASME) as general keywords.

If you cannot find it, call your departmental librarian. Don't spend hours trying to find something when you can call or e-mail for help. 

The citations to conference proceedings have lots of pieces. It is important to know what the pieces are so that you know which pieces to search for.

Here is an example of what a citation to a conference paper can look like: 

Bayazit, B., Hollingsworth, D., Witte, L., Heat Transfer Enhancement Caused by Sliding Bubbles; Proceedings of NHTC '01, 35th National Heat Transfer Conference, Anaheim California, June 10-12, 2001.  Sponsored by the Heat Transfer Division of ASME, American Institute of chemical Engineers (AIChE) and American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) editors T.A. Bergman and C. B. Panchal. 

 This citation includes the following:

1. Paper Authors: Bayazit, Hollingsworth, and Witte
   
2. Paper Title: Heat Transfer Enhancement Caused by Sliding Bubbles
   
3. Proceedings Title: Proceedings of the National Heat Transfer Conference 2001 (NHTC '01), 35th National Heat Transfer Conference
   
4. Conference Location: Anaheim, California
   
5. Conference Dates: June 10-12, 2001
   
6. Conference Sponsors: ASME, AIChE, and AIAA
   
7. Proceedings Editors: Bergman and Panchal

When searching in the catalog, use keywords from #3-7. When searching in a database, use #1 and/or #2. The reason is that the catalog contains book and journal TITLES, and databases contain JOURNAL ARTICLES and CONFERENCE PAPERS.

If the library doesn't own the proceedings VOLUME, you may get either a single paper from the volume or the entire volume through InterLibrary Services.  

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