Try Wonders for freeWhat an engineering literature review actually involves
Engineering publishes differently from the rest of the university, and a review that treats it like a humanities reading list goes wrong quickly.
- Conference proceedings are primary. In computing, signal processing and much of electrical engineering, the proceedings paper is the publication. Treating conference work as second-class loses you the current state of the art.
- Standards define the problem. A great deal of applied engineering research is written against a designated standard, and the standard, not the paper, is what the reader needs identified precisely.
- Patents hold findings that never reach a journal. Industrial work often appears as prior art and nowhere else. Google Patents states that it "includes over 120 million patent publications from 100+ patent offices around the world", with full-text indexing for 21 of those offices, plus technical documents from Google Scholar and Books and the Prior Art Archive.
- The subject databases are specialist. Elsevier describes Engineering Village as "Home of premium engineering databases like Compendex and Inspec", holding "journals, conference proceedings, dissertations, technical standards, trade magazines, technical reports and engineering information". That is the shape of an engineering search, and it is a subscription your library either has or does not.
The specific problems
Terminology is fragmented and abbreviated. The same component has a trade name, a standards designation and three academic descriptions. A review that searches one of them is not a review of the literature, it is a review of one vocabulary.
Numbered references are unforgiving of edits. IEEE numbers sources in the order they are first cited. Move a paragraph and every number after it changes — which is precisely why this should not be maintained by hand.
The interesting result may be in a patent. Especially for anything with a commercial application, where the company that made it had no reason to publish a paper.
Full text sits behind society subscriptions. IEEE, ASME and ASCE publish their own libraries, and your access depends on what your institution licenses.
What Wonders does for those problems
- Papers and patents in one project. Wonders searches OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar — over 320 million scholarly works — and Google Patents as a separate corpus, so prior art sits next to the literature instead of in another tab.
- A Boolean builder you can read. The query string is visible and editable, which is how you get the trade name, the standards designation and the academic terms into one strategy. See Boolean search strings for databases.
- IEEE references that renumber themselves. Inline citations in the notebook, automatic bibliography in IEEE among six styles, export to LaTeX as well as DOCX, PDF and HTML, plus BibTeX, RIS and CSV. There is no Overleaf button — you export the file and upload it.
- Quote checking and page numbers. A direct quote is checked against the paper's text before it is shown; where full text is available a citation carries the page number and opens the PDF there.
- Journal quality in the ranking. SCImago quartiles for more than 28,000 journals, usable as a filter — useful in a field with a long tail of low-quality conference venues.
- Library routing. OpenURL, EZproxy, OpenAthens, KBART and LibKey, where your institution has set them up, so an IEEE or ASME link resolves against your subscription.
Citation provenance with a supervisor audit view, real-time co-editing and project-wide chat are in beta. Chat with a single paper works today, after login.
What Wonders does not do, and what to use instead
| The job | Does Wonders do it? | What to use |
|---|---|---|
| Search Compendex or Inspec | No | Engineering Village, through your library |
| Give you the text of a standard | No | The standards body, or your library's standards subscription |
| Classification-code patent searching (CPC/IPC) | No | Google Patents directly, or your national patent office's search |
| ASME or ASCE formatted references | No | A reference manager, or our ASME and ASCE guides by hand |
| Push a bibliography into Overleaf | No | Export BibTeX and upload it |
| Datasets, simulation output, CAD | No | Your discipline's repository and tooling |
| Write the report, or paraphrase a source | No, deliberately | Nothing |
Use something else if your review must be reproducible from a named engineering database — some departments require a documented Compendex or Inspec strategy, and a general index will not satisfy that.
Wonders is a reasonable fit if you are writing a final-year project, masters thesis or conference paper where the work is scoping an unfamiliar area, keeping papers and patents together, and producing IEEE references that stay correct while you rewrite.
What it costs
Plus is $20 a month, or $144 a year — $12 a month. Verified students pay $10 a month, or $72 a year — $6 a month. There is a 14-day free trial and no free plan. See pricing.