When searching IEEE Xplore, you can use search techniques that are commonly used in other databases and search engines.
You need to type in the keywords or phrases of your research question. So, for example, if your question was...
Discuss the use of sensors to monitor railway track conditions.
...you could try the key words/ phrases:
sensors
AND monitor
AND "railway track conditions" (putting a quote in quotation marks will search for that exact phrase)
You then might like to think about synonyms (words with similar or the same meaning) so your search might become:
sensors
AND monitor* OR assess* OR detect* OR scan*
AND "railway track" conditions
(Adding an asterisk (*) to the end of the beginning of a word will search for all words beginning with that stem, so for example, market* would search for market, marketing, marketed, markets etc)
Click on the Advanced Search box underneath the Search box. The advanced search in IEEE Xplore would look like this:
Here, you're asking the database to search for articles with the words sensor (also sensors) AND either the words monitor (also monitors, monitoring etc) OR assess (also assessing, assesses etc) OR detect (also detects, detected etc) OR scan (also scans, scanning etc) AND the phrase "railway track" with the word conditions.
Once you click on the search button, you'll get some results and they be listed in order of relevance - i.e. the more your words or phrases appear in the article, the higher up they will be towards to the top of the list.
On the left-hand side, you can refine your results, for example you might want to look at articles published in the past 5 years. All articles on IEEE Explore are peer-reviewed.
To read an abstract of an article (the article summary), click on Abstract. This is all you need to read to determine if the article is going to be useful. If it is, then you can open the full text by clicking on the PDF icon.
