Technical reports

Technical reports are the primary means of technical communication for many organisations.

A technical report may contain:

experimental procedures
production data
specifications
standards
operating plans
drawings and/or raw results.

They will set out the conclusions and recommendations from the research, and describe all aspects of the research, sometimes including those parts that failed.

A large amount of valuable information contained in reports will never be formally published as a journal article or within a book so they can be difficult to find.

Sources for technical reports

Some useful sources for technical reports are:

NASA Technical Reports Server (NRTS): NASA's current and historical aerospace research and engineering results, including aerospace-related citations, full-text access online, images and videos
One Petro database: technical literature from professional societies or organisations in the oil and gas exploration and production industry
OSTI: a collection of US Department of Energy technical reports
Society of Automative Engineers (SAE) Digital Library: all SAE publications and some publications from other automotive and aerospace publishers dating back to 1906.

You can also find SAE technical papers from 1992 to 1998 on microfiche in the Library stores.