Field Guide
Helpful Hints & Tips on Using Knovel
 

Getting Started

What www.knovel.com can do far exceeds what anyone can explain to you, because “every day you write the book”. There’s so much content and so many powerful features with which to extract your answers, you have to experience it for yourself. And the only way for the other problem-solvers in your organization to come to know www.knovel.com as a tool they can rely on every day is to use it. Use the Knovel search engine to do a 3-deep Boolean search. Go into the IDS Tables and IDS Graphs, and IDS Equations with Plots and get some answers. Get your own targeted, focused results for actual problems you face

The www.knovel.com Home Page

Our Home Page is arranged to address the needs of scientists and engineers in several different ways:

• Quick Search: Enables a keyword search on the entire knovel.com site or, if you prefer, within a particular book.
• Subject Areas: Each of which contains a subset of books relevant to that topic. Clicking on a Subject Area will reveal the titles of books in that area. You can then access those books directly, and search with keywords within the book or the Subject Area.
• Featured Titles: Sends you directly to each of the most popular and familiar titles on www.knovel.com.
• Site Keyword Search and Advanced Search: The most powerful tools on www.knovel.com are these, tucked away in the upper right-hand corner of the Home Page. These allow scientists and engineers to search ALL the aggregated content on www.knovel.com using multiple keywords and/or data and/or data ranges.

Searching www.knovel.com

Note: In order to actually see the results of a search, you must either have a Knovel account or be signed up for a Knovel trial (see below). Until then you can visit www.knovel.com, browse and see what’s there, but you will not be able to view the actual pages of text and data.

To get a feel for the capabilities of the Knovel search engine, try this example, which shows how you can use www.knovel.com to find all the alcohols that have a melting point between 50 and 100°C and a boiling point greater than 200°C and less than 300°C:
(See Fig. 1)

• From our Home Page at http://www.knovel.com/, click on the Advanced Search button in the button bar in the upper right part of the screen.
• Complete the section Advanced Search:
  
  1. Organize your search: All subject areas
• Complete the section Data Search Criteria:
  
  
  1. Complete the subsection Define 1st Criteria:
     
     

     — Category: materials and substances

     — Field Name: material or substance name

     — Operator: is (=)

     — Keyword: alcohol

  2. Complete the subsection Define 2nd Criteria:
     
     

     — Set Boolean to AND

     — Category: physical constants

     — Field Name: melting point

     — Operator: is between (>=/<=)

     — Numeric range: 50 – 100 °C

  3. Complete the subsection Define 3rd Criteria:
     
     

     — Set Boolean to AND

     — Category: physical constants

     — Field Name: boiling point

     — Operator: is between (>=/<=)

     — Numeric range: 200 – 300 °C

• Click on Search

(See Fig. 2)
The results of this search highlight one of the many strengths of www.knovel.com: locating slightly different information across multiple books. You will find you have 54 match(es) in 7 book(s):

1. Knovel Critical Tables, AND
2. International Critical Tables, AND
3. Sax’s Dangerous Properties of Industrial Materials, AND
4. Hawley’s Condensed Chemical Dictionary, AND
5. Perry’s Chemical Engineers Handbook, AND
6. Lange’s Handbook of Chemistry, AND
7. Dictionary of Substances and their Effects (DOSE, 2nd Electronic Ed.) Volumes 1-7

Can you imagine the time it would take a chemist looking in hardcover books to uncover all this? This is just one example of the synergy provided by www.knovel.com. There are many other examples of this powerful synergy that occur all across the Knovel content.

Figure 1



Figure 2



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