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Technical Reports
What's a "technical report" ?
A technical report is "an important means of... recording... the activities and the results of progress and research in... science and technology.
"Where once reports were simply the reporting of government-sponsored research, they are now used as a means of communicating information for technical development throughout the world."
[Report Series Codes Dictionary, 3rd edition, 1986]
Specialized Tech Report Collections
MILITARY
DTIC (Defense Technical Information Center)
- DTIC's publicly available collection of military reports and documents, going all the way back to the beginning of the 1900's, is available through Science.gov
NASA
NASA Technical Reports Server [1915+] -- This is a continually growing collection of information about NASA's current and historical research and engineering. It contains:
- NACA [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics] information covers 1915-1958
- NASA information covers 1958 to the present
- NIX collection includes images, photos, movies, and videos downloaded from the NASA Image eXchange
For reports from the Jet Propulsion Lab, the best thing to do (after exhausting all other options) is to contact the library directly at library@jpl.nasa.gov.
HISTORY OF NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY
Los Alamos Technical Reports site -- In 2002, the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) terminated public access to thousands of unclassified reports about nuclear science and technology.
Fortunately, almost all of the withdrawn reports were acquired and preserved so that the public has access to them.
How to Find and Get Technical Reports
A technical report is an "important sources of scientific and technical information derived from research projects sponsored by [the U.S. government].
---They describe the processes, progress, or results of research and development or other scientific and technological work, including recommendations or conclusions of the research and such information as the original hypotheses, approaches used, and findings.
---Technical reports are useful to researchers because they often include more comprehensive or detailed information than scholarly papers or presentations, including experimental designs and technical drawings.
---Technical reports also may document negative results, which can help prevent the misapplication of research resources.
This page of our U.S. Government Information guide lists some sites that have tech reports. (Some duplicate the ones below.)
Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) -- Here is the publicly available section of DTIC. It is a Department of Defense "Field Activity." Here is more information.
National Technical Information Service (NTIS) [1964 to the present, with some info as far back as 1899] - NTIS is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce and is responsible for storing and disseminating technical reports generated from U.S. government-sponsored work. The database includes 3 million+ unclassified DoD, DoE, NASA, and other reports.
NTIS reports can be searched in two ways:
- Search the National Technical Reports Library (NTRL)
- Search the NTIS database [this is easier]
OSTI.gov -- ~3 million Department of Energy tech reports.
Science.gov -- ~200 million pages of science information and R&D results for 36+ U.S. government agencies.
- Search here for to get the list of specialized U.S. government databases available for searching
- Go here for the page that allows you to search across all of them at the same time
TRAIL (Technical Report Archive and Image Library) -- TRAIL "identifies, acquires, catalogs, digitizes and provides unrestricted access to U.S. government agency technical reports."
WorldWideScience.org -- This web site, which also includes the information within Science.gov (listed above), is a gateway to national and international scientific databases. You can search resources from 17 countries, including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, and the UK.