LibGuides: Chemistry: Tech Reports

General Sources

Technical reports are not typically indexed by the major literature abstracting services, although some can be found in SciFinder, Compendex, and a few others. Some of the tools below serve as both indexes and full text repositories, and should be your first stop in a search. Searching a report number or title in Google can sometimes provide good leads, although in many cases these will be citations in other documents rather than full text.

NTRL: National Technical Reports Library from the National Technical Information Service
The National Technical Information Service (NTIS, part of the Commerce Dept.) served for decades as the primary clearinghouse for federal government technical reports. (Its stated mission has changed substantially under recent administrations.) The NTRL database provides access to about 800,000 full text reports as well as about two million bibliographic records since 1919. Coverage fell off sharply after 2010, as many agencies took over distributing their own reports, and coverage of DOE reports was always spotty at best. The NTRL interface likewise leaves much to be desired. Contact a librarian before requesting a non-digitized report via interlibrary loan.

Free registration is required to download the reports. The remaining reports, most published before 1995 are gradually being added to the collection. Those not yet scanned may be requested via InterLibrary Services or purchased.
Contact the Subject Expert for this database for additional information or assistance.

TRAIL
The Technical Report and Image Library is a collaborative project across a number of libraries to inventory and digitize selected federal technical reports, primarily issued prior to 1976. Over 57,000 reports from a variety of agencies have been digitized and placed in various online repositories.
Technical Reports and Standards (Library of Congress)
The TRS unit of the Library of Congress holds over 5 million current and historical technical reports and standards on microform, digital media and paper.
Science.gov
Science.gov searches over 60 databases and over 2200 selected websites from 15 federal agencies, offering 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information including research and development results.
WorldwideScience.org
A global gateway resource similar to the U.S. Science.gov, co-sponsored by DOE-OSTI. Worth checking for foreign tech reports.

Department of Energy

The DOE and its predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) were prodigious producers of technical reports in the decades after WWII. They issued millions of reports under a bewildering array of laboratories, sub-agencies, series, conferences and numbering systems.

OSTI.gov
OSTI.GOV makes discoverable over 70 years of research results from DOE and its predecessor agencies. Research results include journal articles/accepted manuscripts and related metadata; technical reports; scientific research datasets and collections; scientific software; patents; conference and workshop papers; books and theses; and multimedia. OSTI.GOV contains nearly 3 million citations, including citations to 1.5 million journal articles, 1 million of which have digital object identifiers (DOIs) linking to full-text articles on publishers' websites. It also has more than 445,000 full-text DOE-funded STI documents. This database was formerly known as SciTech Connect, and before that Energy Citations Database.
DOE Data Explorer
A search tool for public DOE data collections (not tech reports per se) - such as computer simulations, numeric data files, figures and plots, interactive maps, multimedia, and scientific images - generated in the course of DOE-sponsored research in various disciplines.
INIS
INIS (International Nuclear Information System) is a database of over 3.6 million bibliographic references on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy back to 1970. (IAEA)

Obtaining Reports

Finding older DOE-sponsored reports can be challenging. After World War II the AEC, its successors ERDA (1975-77), and DOE (1977-) issued unclassified reports in paper and microform via their own depository programs. From the early 1980s through the mid-1990s DOE/OSTI ran a depository program for participating libraries that was separate from the NTIS SRIM and GPO depository programs. Reports were rarely cataloged by owning libraries and have ended up in storage or discarded. UT Austin has not retained the selected reports once held. Recent projects by staff at Pennsylvania State University and by TRAIL are working to catalog and digitize AEC reports. OCLC/WorldCat will give these records.

Cornell Library Guide to DOE Reports
Contains a helpful table of important DOE report series.

Department of Defense

Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)
Public access to bibliographic data and some full text of unclassified DoD documents and technical reports since 1974.

EPA

EPA Publications
EPA's gateway to digital and paper publications. Warning: EPA documents can be very difficult to find! (For more information on EPA analytical methods see the Analytical Chemistry guide, under the "Standard Methods" tab.)

NEPIS: National Environmental Publications Information System

Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Provides full text access from a collection of over 7,000 archival and current documents published by the Environmental Protection Agency. Allows searching, viewing, and printing, including full images of all original pages and full-text. Includes documents that are no longer available in print form.

NASA

NASA Technical Reports Server
NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) provides access to aerospace-related citations, full-text online documents, and images and videos. The types of information include: conference papers, journal articles, meeting papers, patents, research reports, images, movies, and technical videos – scientific and technical information (STI) created or funded by NASA and its predecessor NACA.

NIST

NIST Technical Series Publications
NIST Technical Series publications are written by or for NIST and published by the NIST Research Library. These publications consist of technical reports, recommendations, practice guides, industry handbooks, and other similar technical documents intended for external distribution.

What are Tech Reports?

Technical reports usually originate in federal government agencies, but may also come from academic institutions, state or foreign governments, and private firms and organizations. They contain results of research carried out in government labs or on government contracts or, in the case of private companies, for in-house, proprietary use. They are often cited in the literature using obscure report numbering systems or vague and incomplete references, and they can be quite difficult to verify and obtain. In past decades some libraries participated in large microfiche depository programs run by DOE and NTIS, but these were phased out after the 1990s. While thousands of legacy federal agency reports have been digitized in recent years by various parties, many older and non-federal reports that are held in libraries exist only in paper or microform, often with little or no cataloging or inventory. Many more were never held in libraries and have likely vanished altogether. Consult a librarian for assistance.