Skip to content
Penn State University Libraries

Technical Reports

 

Contact

Bonnie Osif photo

Bonnie Osif
Title: Engineering Librarian


Linda  Musser photo

Linda Musser
Title: Distinguished Librarian and Head Earth and Mineral Sciences Library


General Resources

NTIS (National Technical Information Service)

NTIS is the U.S. Government agency charged with the collecting and disseminating scientific and technical reports from government-sponsored research. The NTIS database contains records of unclassified research materials from 1964 to date. Citations and abstracts from unclassified government-sponsored research reports from the Departments of Defense, Department of Energy, NASA, EPA, and other federal agencies, and international government departments and other international organizations including those from Canada, Japan, the former Soviet Union, Western and Eastern European countries.

Technical Reports Search (This free version contains brief records only)
NTIS Database (Full database license for PSU use)

Science.gov

This index simultaneously searches over 45 databases and websites of the US government.

TRAIL: Technical Report Archive and Image Library - this is a new digital collection that is still under development.  TRAIL aims to provide free access to U.S. federal technical reports issued prior to 1975, that are not available in any other electronic collection.  The collection currently contains reports from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the U.S. Bureau of Mines, and the National Bureau of Standards.

Virtual Technical Reports Center The University of Maryland’s Virtual Technical Reports Center contains links to institution technical reports (full-text or extended abstracts), preprints, reprints, dissertations, theses, and research reports of all kinds.

Specialized Resources

 

U.S. Resources

DTIC - Public Technical Reports (formerly Public STINET)  - The Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) Public STINET database provides access to citations of unclassified, unlimited documents that have been entered into DTIC's Technical Reports Collection, as well as the electronic full-text of selected documents.

Energy Citations Database (Available from 1948 - to date) - Energy Citations Database (ECD) contains bibliographic records for energy and energy-related scientific and technical information from the Department of Energy (DOE) and its predecessor agencies, the Energy Research & Development Administration (ERDA) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). ECD provides access to DOE publicly available citations from 1948 through the present, with continued growth through regular updates. Science Accelerator is another search interface to the DOE reports.

ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) (Available from 1966- to date) - ERIC provides access to bibliographic records of journal articles, technical reports and other education-related materials. ERIC at http://www.eric.ed.gov/ links to full text, if available. ERIC is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences (IES). Kennesaw State University Library and Georgia State University Library (microfiche) have large holdings of documents indexed in ERIC.

National Environmental Publications Internet Site (NEPIS) (Available from 1997- to date) - EPA's electronic documents site allows you to search, view and print, including full images of all original pages and full-text, from a collection of over 11,000 archival and current documents. Includes 400 Series (Air and Radiation, OAR), 500 Series (Solid Waste and Emergency Response, OSWER), 600 Series (Research and Development, ORB), 700 Series (Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances, OPPTS) and 800 Series (Water, OW) and more.

NTRS: NASA Technical Report Server (Available from 1917- to date) - Provides access to NASA aerospace information and domestic and international STI (scientific and technical information) pertinent to NASA's missions. Contains the searchable CASITRS (RECONselect) and NACA Technical Reports databases and databases from selected space and aeronautics centers. Includes research reports, journal articles, conference and meeting papers, technical videos, operational documents, and preliminary data (with some full-text coverage).

Transportation Research Information Service (TRIS Online) (Available from 1960s- to date) - TRIS is the largest and most comprehensive bibliographic resource on transportation information. The database provides access to bibliographic records covering transportation, selected links to full text or sources of full text, and links to the ITRD database for further coverage of international transportation.

Subject Index to Unclassified ASTIA Documents - ASTIA was the Army Services Technical Information Agency. This work is an index to approximately 40,000 unclassified documents that appeared in the AD series, number range from 1 to 75,000. This print index has been scanned and is fulltext searchable at the HathiTrust. Also published was a Correlation index of technical reports (AD-PB reports) , showing equivalent technical report numbers. An equivalent PB-AD report index was published later.

 

Non-U.S. Resources

Obtaining Technical Reports

Many of the databases contain links to full-text reports.

PSU Collection