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Explore science by method, field & evidence.

One catalogue of research methods — learn how each one works, when to use it, and what it can’t do.

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330 methods in EngineeringClear
Real methods matching your filter.
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text mining

Abbreviation Expansion

Abbreviation and acronym resolution is a natural-language-processing pipeline that maps each short form in a text to its full-length definition using contextual cues from the surrounding text. It is especially important in medical, legal, and technical documents, where the same acronym may carry entirely different mean

2 sources2003
architecture

Acoustic Design Analysis

Acoustic Design Analysis is a method for evaluating the acoustical properties of buildings to predict sound levels, reverberation time, and speech intelligibility. Founded by Wallace Clement Sabine in the early 1900s, the field encompasses room acoustic design (controlling reverberation), sound transmission loss (preve

3 sources1922
environmental engineering

Activated Sludge Model

The Activated Sludge Model (ASM) is a standardized mathematical framework for simulating biological wastewater treatment processes, developed by the International Association on Water Quality (IAWQ) beginning in 1987. It represents the transport, transformation, and fate of organic matter and nutrients in suspended-gro

3 sources1976
control theory

Active Disturbance Rejection Control

Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC) is a control method that estimates and cancels disturbances and model uncertainties in real-time using an extended state observer (ESO), treating them as additional 'disturbance states'. Developed by Han and popularized by Gao, ADRC achieves remarkable robustness without requ

2 sources2009
control theory

Adaptive Control

Adaptive Control is a control strategy that adjusts controller parameters in real-time based on online system identification to maintain performance despite changing plant dynamics or uncertain parameters. Pioneered by Astrom and Wittenmark, adaptive control enables robust operation in time-varying environments, from a

2 sources1983
manufacturing

Additive Manufacturing Slicing

Additive manufacturing slicing is the computational process of converting a three-dimensional CAD model into a series of two-dimensional cross-sectional layers that are sequentially built up by 3D printing hardware. Developed during the early maturation of stereolithography and selective laser sintering in the 1990s, t

3 sources1990
software engineering

Agile Velocity Tracking

Velocity tracking measures the amount of work (typically story points or tasks) a team completes in a sprint, enabling capacity planning, release forecasting, and identification of process improvements. Introduced in Scrum methodology by Schwaber (2002), velocity provides empirical data for realistic sprint planning an

3 sources2002
aerospace

AHRS

An Attitude Heading Reference System (AHRS) is a complete inertial navigation subsystem that estimates and outputs the three-dimensional orientation (attitude) and heading of a vehicle or platform. AHRS combines measurements from accelerometers, gyroscopes, and often magnetometers through sensor fusion algorithms (typi

3 sources1940
environmental engineering

Air Dispersion Modeling

Air dispersion modeling is a quantitative method to predict the concentration and deposition of air pollutants (dust, gases, particulates) released from industrial sources, traffic, or combustion. Developed empirically by Pasquill and Gifford in the 1960s and formalized into the Gaussian plume model, these methods pred

3 sources1961
telecommunications

Alamouti Code

The Alamouti code is an elegant space-time coding scheme that provides full transmit diversity using two antennas and a simple linear receiver. Introduced by Siavash Alamouti in 1998, it requires no channel state information at the transmitter, achieves the same bit-error rate as a single-antenna system with receiver d

2 sources1998
biomaterials

Alizarin Red Staining

Alizarin red-S (1,2-dihydroxyanthraquinone-3-sulfonic acid) is a calcium-binding dye that forms a colored complex with mineralized deposits, enabling direct visualization and quantification of bone matrix mineralization. Developed as a standard assay by Gregory and colleagues in 2004, alizarin red staining is widely us

3 sources2004
software engineering

Architecture Smell Detection

Architecture smells are recurring patterns in system structure that indicate potential design problems. Introduced by García et al. (2009), these patterns signal violations of architectural principles (modularity, independence, abstraction) at system scale. Detection combines code metrics, dependency analysis, and patt

3 sources2009
text mining

Argument Mining

Argument mining is a natural-language-processing task that automatically detects claims, premises and the argumentative structures that link them within text. Consolidated as a field by Lippi and Torroni's 2016 state-of-the-art survey, it is applied to scientific writing, legal documents and debate analysis to turn fre

2 sources2016
text mining

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained natural-language-processing task that detects sentiment separately for each aspect or feature mentioned in a text — such as a product's quality, price, or service — rather than scoring the document as a whole. It was consolidated as a shared task by Pontiki et al

2 sources2014
materials science

Atomic Force Microscopy

Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) is a scanning probe technique that measures nanoscale surface topography and mechanical properties by monitoring interactions between a sharp cantilever tip and a sample surface. Invented by Gerd Binnig in 1986 as an extension of scanning tunneling microscopy, AFM requires neither electric

3 sources1986
text mining

Authorship Attribution

Authorship attribution is the task of identifying the most probable author of an anonymous or disputed text by analysing its stylistic fingerprint. Rooted in the statistical work of Mosteller and Wallace on the Federalist Papers (1964), the field was systematically surveyed and formalised by Stamatatos (2009), who cata

1 source2009
text mining

Automated Essay Scoring

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is a natural-language-processing task in which a computational model assigns scores to student-written essays across dimensions such as grammatical correctness, coherence, content richness, and organisation — replicating, at scale, what a human rater would do. The approach was formalised a

2 sources1966
electrical engineering

Automatic Test Pattern Generation

Automatic Test Pattern Generation (ATPG) is the automated creation of test vectors that detect manufacturing defects in digital circuits. Pioneered by Roth in 1966, ATPG systematically finds inputs that make stuck-at faults observable at outputs, enabling comprehensive fault detection. ATPG is critical for semiconducto

3 sources1966
text mining

Automatic Text Evaluation

Automatic text evaluation is a family of reference-based metrics used to measure the quality of machine-generated text — such as translations, summaries, or natural-language-generation (NLG) outputs — by comparing them to one or more human-written reference texts. Pioneered by Papineni et al. with BLEU in 2002, the fie

2 sources2002
aerospace

B-Dot Controller

The B-Dot controller (magnetic B-dot control law) is a simple, robust spacecraft attitude control method that uses the rate of change of Earth's magnetic field measured onboard to generate a magnetic dipole moment. Developed in the 1980s, the B-Dot law damps spacecraft angular momentum without requiring a complex attit

3 sources1980
control theory

Backstepping Control

Backstepping is a systematic nonlinear control design method that decomposes a complex nonlinear system into simpler subsystems and designs a controller recursively, layer by layer, ensuring stability at each step. Developed by Krstic, Kanellakopoulos, and Kokotovic, backstepping enables control of nonlinear systems wi

1 source1995
biomechanics

BCI Motor Imagery

Brain-computer interface (BCI) using motor imagery decodes the intent to move from brain activity (typically EEG) recorded while subjects imagine movement without actual muscle contraction. Pioneered by Gert Pfurtscheller and colleagues, motor imagery BCIs enable communication and control for paralyzed patients and enh

2 sources1999
civil engineering

BEM Geomechanics

The boundary element method (BEM) for geomechanics is a numerical approach that solves problems by discretizing only the boundary of the domain, using analytical solutions for the interior. Introduced by Brebbia in 1978 and refined for geotechnical applications by Crouch and Starfield, BEM is particularly effective for

3 sources1978
text mining

BERT Embeddings

BERT-based text embeddings, introduced by Devlin and colleagues at Google AI in 2019, turn text into context-sensitive dense vectors using a bidirectional Transformer encoder. Because the meaning of a word shifts with its context, BERT produces richer representations than static methods such as Word2Vec or topic models

2 sources2019
text mining

BERTopic

BERTopic is a neural topic-modeling pipeline introduced by Maarten Grootendorst in 2022. It combines BERT-based contextual embeddings with UMAP dimensionality reduction and HDBSCAN clustering to produce coherent, dynamic topics, achieving higher topic coherence than classic topic models.

2 sources2022
materials science

BET Surface Area

Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) Surface Area Analysis is a technique for measuring the specific surface area of solids by analyzing their nitrogen adsorption isotherms. Developed by Brunauer, Emmett, and Teller in 1938, BET theory extends monolayer adsorption (Langmuir) to multilayer adsorption, enabling quantification of

3 sources1938
telecommunications

BGP

BGP is the de facto standard routing protocol for interconnecting autonomous systems (ASs) on the Internet. Since its introduction in 1989, BGP has scaled the Internet to millions of routers and trillions of destinations. BGP is path-vector-based, using a flexible policy system to control route propagation and selectio

2 sources1989
environmental engineering

Biogas Production Modeling

Biogas production modeling is a quantitative method to predict methane and carbon dioxide generation from anaerobic digestion of organic residues (wastewater sludge, food waste, agricultural manure, slaughterhouse waste). Developed from microbial kinetics and thermodynamics, these models account for substrate compositi

3 sources1973
aerospace

Blade Element Momentum Theory

Blade element momentum theory (BEM) is a fundamental method for analyzing rotor performance by combining blade element aerodynamics with momentum conservation. Developed initially by Froude and refined by Glauert and Leishman, BEM decomposes a rotor into radial blade elements, computes local aerodynamic forces, and sum

3 sources1889
biomaterials

BMP Release

The bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) release assay measures the kinetics and amount of BMP elution from a biomaterial carrier over time. BMP-2, BMP-6, BMP-7, and BMP-9 are potent osteoinductive growth factors discovered by Marshall Urist in 1965 that trigger bone and cartilage formation. When loaded into scaffolds, hyd

3 sources1965
mining engineering

Bond Work Index

The Bond Work Index, introduced by Fred C. Bond in 1952, is an empirical parameter that characterizes the resistance of an ore to grinding in a tumbling mill. It is defined as the kilowatt-hours per short ton (kWh/st) of electrical energy required to reduce a coarse ore from theoretically infinite size to 80% passing 1

2 sources1952
materials science

Boundary Element Method

The Boundary Element Method (BEM) is a numerical technique that solves partial differential equations by transforming them into boundary integral equations, requiring discretization only of the problem boundary rather than the entire domain. Developed systematically by Carlos Brebbia in the late 1970s, BEM offers signi

3 sources1978
architecture

Building Energy Performance Simulation

Building Energy Performance Simulation is a computational method for predicting how much energy a building consumes for heating, cooling, lighting, and equipment operation under specified weather and occupancy conditions. Pioneered by researchers like Joe Clarke and Drury Crawley in the 1990s, it has become essential f

3 sources1993
materials science

CALPHAD

CALPHAD (CALculation of PHAse Diagrams) is a computational method for predicting thermodynamic equilibrium properties and phase diagrams of multicomponent alloys. Pioneered by Larry Kaufman in 1970, CALPHAD combines experimental and computational data to assess thermodynamic properties of phases and subsequently predic

3 sources1970
biomaterials

CAM Assay

The chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) assay is a well-established in vivo model for studying angiogenesis (new blood vessel formation) and evaluating the pro- or anti-angiogenic properties of biomaterials, drugs, and bioactive molecules. Developed by Judah Folkman in the 1970s, the assay uses the highly vascularized CAM o

3 sources1974
environmental engineering

Carbon Footprint Analysis

Carbon footprint analysis quantifies the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—expressed in CO2-equivalent (CO2e)—attributable to an activity, product, organization, or process. Developed from life cycle assessment (LCA) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) methodologies, carbon accounting encompasses di

3 sources1993
biomechanics

CFD Hemodynamics

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for hemodynamics solves the Navier-Stokes equations to simulate blood flow in realistic vascular geometries. Pioneered by researchers such as David Steinman, CFD hemodynamics reveals complex flow patterns, wall shear stress distributions, and hemodynamic factors implicated in atherosc

2 sources2002
text mining

Chunking

Chunking, also called shallow parsing, is a natural-language-processing task introduced by Steven Abney in 1991 that divides text into grammatical pieces — such as noun phrases and verb phrases — using part-of-speech tags. It extracts useful syntactic structure quickly without building a full parse tree of the sentence

2 sources1991
text mining

Clinical Text Mining

Clinical text mining is a specialised branch of natural language processing that extracts structured clinical facts — diagnoses, symptoms, medications, treatments, and ICD codes — from unstructured healthcare documents such as discharge summaries, progress notes, and radiology reports. Grounded in biomedical NLP models

2 sources2000
manufacturing

CNC Tool Path Generation

CNC tool path generation is the computational process of determining the precise sequence and trajectory of tool movements required to machine a workpiece on computer numerical control (CNC) machines. Developed from the intersection of numerical control automation and computational geometry in the 1990s, this method tr

3 sources1990
text mining

Co-occurrence Analysis

Co-occurrence analysis is a text-mining technique that statistically counts the word pairs that appear together within a window or a sentence and uses their frequencies to reveal semantic maps and thematic structure. It rests on the distributional principle articulated by J.R. Firth in 1957 — that a word is characteris

2 sources1957
software engineering

Code Coverage Analysis

Code coverage analysis measures the extent to which source code is executed by a test suite, quantifying which lines, branches, or paths are exercised. Tools instrument code to track execution, reporting coverage percentages and identifying untested regions. Coverage analysis guides test creation, detects dead code, an

3 sources1988
text mining

Collocation Analysis

Collocation analysis is a statistical text-mining technique that identifies word pairs or expressions that frequently occur together, using association measures rather than chance co-occurrence. Introduced in the lexicography work of Church and Hanks (1990), it is used for terminology extraction and language analysis,

2 sources1990
biomechanics

Common Spatial Pattern

Common Spatial Pattern (CSP) is a spatial filtering technique that identifies electrode combinations that maximize the variance difference between two classes of EEG activity, typically used in brain-computer interfaces to enhance motor imagery discrimination. Introduced by Ramoser and colleagues in 2000, CSP has becom

2 sources2000
text mining

Commonsense Reasoning

Commonsense reasoning in NLP refers to the capacity of a language model or inference system to draw on implicit, world-knowledge facts that humans take for granted — facts not stated in the text — to answer questions, complete stories, or interpret dialogue. Landmark benchmarks formalising the task include ATOMIC (Sap

2 sources2019
text mining

Constituency Parsing

Constituency parsing is a natural-language-processing task that represents a sentence as a tree of recursively nested phrase-structure constituents — for example S → NP + VP. Building on the head-driven statistical parsing models introduced by Collins (2003) and the later neural parsers of Kitaev and colleagues (2019),

2 sources2003
environmental engineering

Constructed Wetland Design

Constructed wetland design is an environmental engineering approach that harnesses natural biological and chemical processes—microorganism metabolism, plant uptake, soil sorption, sedimentation—to treat wastewater, stormwater, and agricultural runoff. Developed systematically in the 1970s by German researchers Seidel a

3 sources1973
biomaterials

Contact Angle Goniometry

Contact angle goniometry is a technique for measuring the wettability of a solid surface by determining the angle at which a liquid droplet meets the surface. Rooted in Thomas Young's thermodynamic analysis from 1805, the method uses optical measurement of droplet profile to quantify surface energy and hydrophilicity.

3 sources1805
text mining

Contrastive Learning for NLP

Contrastive learning for NLP is a representation-learning technique — popularised by SimCSE (Gao et al., 2021) and Supervised Contrastive Learning (Khosla et al., 2020) — that trains a text encoder by pulling embeddings of similar text pairs together while pushing embeddings of dissimilar pairs apart. The result is a d

2 sources2020
text mining

Coreference Resolution

Coreference resolution is a natural-language-processing task that detects when different expressions in a text refer to the same entity — for example a name, a later pronoun, and a descriptive phrase all pointing at one person. Rooted in early linguistic work by Hobbs (1978) and advanced by the end-to-end neural model

2 sources1978
text mining

Cross-Document Entity Tracking

Cross-document entity tracking, formally known as cross-document coreference resolution, identifies and merges all references to the same real-world entity scattered across a collection of documents. Rooted in the B3 evaluation framework introduced by Bagga and Baldwin (1998) and substantially advanced by the neural jo

2 sources1998
text mining

Cross-lingual Text Analysis

Cross-lingual text analysis lets you compare and analyse texts written in different languages within a shared vector space. Building on multilingual representation learning surveyed by Conneau et al. (2020) and Pires et al. (2019), it maps documents from several languages into one common embedding space so multilingual

2 sources
telecommunications

CSMA/CA

CSMA/CA is a random access protocol for wireless medium access control, designed to enable multiple devices to share a wireless channel while minimizing collisions. Introduced by Phil Karn in 1990, it is the foundation of WiFi (IEEE 802.11) and is now the de facto standard for unlicensed spectrum access. CSMA/CA combin

2 sources1990
mining engineering

Cut-off Grade (Lane)

Lane's Cut-off Grade Model, developed by Kenneth F. Lane and formalized in his 1988 book, provides a rigorous economic framework for determining the minimum grade at which ore should be mined and processed. It accounts for variable mining costs, metallurgical recovery, and commodity prices to optimize profit per unit p

2 sources1988
architecture

Daylight Simulation

Daylight Simulation is a computational method for predicting the availability and distribution of daylight in interior spaces and assessing visual comfort under varying sky conditions. Developed by researchers like Christoph Reinhart and John Mardaljevic in the 2000s, it has become central to designing healthy, energy-

3 sources2006
aerospace

Dead Reckoning

Dead Reckoning is a fundamental navigation method that estimates position and heading by integrating velocity and angular rate measurements from inertial sensors over time, without external references such as GPS. The term derives from maritime tradition ('deduced reckoning') and remains a cornerstone of aerospace and

3 sources1940
software engineering

Defect Prediction Model

Defect prediction models forecast the likelihood of software faults in code modules using statistical or machine learning approaches. Pioneered by Ostrand, Weyuker, and Bell (2005), these models correlate code metrics (complexity, churn, coupling) with historical defect data to identify high-risk components. Organizati

3 sources2005
manufacturing

Denavit-Hartenberg Parameters

The Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) convention is a systematic mathematical method for assigning coordinate frames to the links of an articulated robot or mechanism, enabling compact representation and computation of forward and inverse kinematics. Introduced by Denavit and Hartenberg in 1955, this method uses only four parame

3 sources1955
text mining

Dependency Parsing

Dependency parsing is a natural-language-processing task that reveals the syntactic dependency relations between the words of a sentence as a tree structure. Surveyed in the dependency-grammar tradition by Nivre (2005) and made fast and accurate with neural networks by Chen and Manning (2014), it is commonly used as a

2 sources
manufacturing

Design for Manufacturing and Assembly

Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA) is a systematic methodology for creating products that are inherently easier and less expensive to manufacture and assemble. Developed by Boothroyd, Dewhurst, and Knight, DFMA evaluates design choices based on their impact on production cost, quality, and speed, guiding desi

3 sources1994