Research Guides: Materials Science & Engineering: Technical Reports

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Technical Reports

Technical reports are a major source of scientific and technical information. A technical report describes different organizations' final results of technical or scientific research for internal use or to the funding organizations.

Based on the sponsoring organization, technical reports fall into two categories: government sponsored or privately funded research reports. Finding technical reports can be difficult due to the lack of systematic control over their publication and dissemination.

References to technical reports may include agency, society, or company delineator, specific number, title, author, and date. For example:

IBM Research RC25276

Accelerating the Deployment of Security Service Infrastructure with Collective Intelligence and Analytics by Maja Vukovic, Christopher Giblin, Sriram K. Rajagopal.

CUCS-001-05(PS); CUCS-001-05(PDF)

The Virtual Device: Expanding Wireless Communication Services Through Service Discovery and Session Mobility by Ron Shacham, Henning Schulzrinne, Srisakul Thakolsri, and Wolfgang Kellerer.

Where to Start?

NTIS (National Technical Information Service) This link opens in a new window
Contains bibliographic citations and summaries of information products, including technical reports, software packages, and data files. The National Technical Information Service is the central source for the public sale of U.S. Government-sponsored research, development, and engineering reports.

Library of Congress

U.S. government Public Technical Reports

Technical Report Archive and Image Library (TRAIL)
A collaborative project to digitize, archive, and provide persistent and unrestricted access to federal technical reports issued prior to 1975.

Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) This link opens in a new window
Provides access to free, publicly-available research sponsored by the Department of Energy (DOE), including technical reports, bibliographic citations, journal articles, conference papers, books, multimedia, software, and data.

Army Corps of Engineers Research and Development Center (CRREL)
The results of CRREL's research projects are published in a technical report series covering topics of interest to Civil and Environmental Engineers. Reports from 1995 to present are available, as well as some older ones.
Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)
DTIC helps the Department of Defense (DoD) community access pertinent scientific and technical information to meet mission needs more effectively.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Fulltext of more than 7,000 archival and current EPA documents.
NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)
1920–present. Indexes technical reports, conference papers, journal articles, and other publications sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). NACA Reports, Technical Notes, and Technical Memoranda are available in fulltext from 1917–1958. Some NASA reports are fulltext.