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Information Systems: Technical Reports

About Technical Reports

What are technical reports?
A technical report is a document that describes the process, progress, or results of technical or scientific research or the state of a technical or scientific research problem.  They are prepared for internal or wider distribution by many organizations.  Technical reports often present cutting edge research before being published in journals or conferences.

Technical Reports online

The largest central resource for government-funded scientific, technical, engineering, and business-related information and acts as a clearinghouse.  With about 3 million titles going back more than 60 years, the NTIS Database is the starting point for record searching. 
 
The National Technical Reports Library (NTRL) offers the American public free access to a searchable online database of approximately three million federal science and technology reports.
 
Carnegie Mellon maintains access to a commercial version of the NTIS database thru Engineering Village.  Request NTIS reports via our Interlibrary Loan system, ILLiad.
 
Citations and some fulltext computer science articles, papers, and technical reports freely available on the Web. 

Carnegie Mellon Technical Reports

CMU has more than 70,000 tech reports from around the world, dating back to the 1960s. These reports are in offsite storage, but can be requested for your use. Tech reports are included in the library catalog, use advanced search to search by title then limit to "Material Type" then "TECH-RPT".
 

Carnegie Mellon Technical Reports

 

 

 

U.S. Government Public Technical Reports

A concise list of government agencies with free access to their technical reports:  

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.

Information Bridge (U.S. Department of Energy)

Provides free public access to over 230,000 full-text documents and bibliographic citations of Department of Energy (DOE) research report literature.  Documents are primarily from 1991-present and were produced by DOE, the DOE contractor community, and/or DOE grantees.

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.

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.

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.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Full text of more than 7,000 archival and current EPA documents.