What is Grey Literature?
Grey (or Gray) literature encompasses information from various sectors such as government, academia, business, and industry, available in electronic and print formats outside commercial publishing control. This includes preprints, newsletters, white papers, working papers, reports, and more. While valuable, this information can be challenging to access and identify.
Technical reports are a subset of grey literature, detailing scientific or technical research progress or outcomes. Typically serving as accountability reports to funding bodies like the government or private industry, their publication and dissemination lack centralized coordination, making them especially difficult to find and obtain.
Where to Find Technical Reports?
National Technical Reports Library(NTRL)
The National Technical Information Service acquires, indexes, abstracts, and archives the largest collection of U.S. government-sponsored technical reports in existence. The NTIS archives reports from the Departments of Defense, Energy, Transportation, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and other government agencies. Some full text available.
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.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Publications
You can search, retrieve, and download EPA technical, scientific, and educational materials from this site –all free of charge!
Energy-related research sponsored by the Department of Energy and its predecessors. Consolidates content from Information Bridge and Energy Citations Database.
Technical Report Archive and Image Library (TRAIL)
Digital archive of US technical reports from dozens of agencies, 1976 and earlier
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Materials Science & Engineering Database This link opens in a new windowIncludes METADEX, Copper and Polymer Library databases and provides full-text titles from around the world, including scholarly journals, trade and industry journals, magazines, technical reports, conference proceedings and government publications. For those researchers who need to conduct comprehensive literature reviews, this database includes specialized, editorially-curated A&I resources for discovery of relevant scholarly research and technical literature critical to the discipline.
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METADEX This link opens in a new windowThis database is the only comprehensive materials science research solution providing indexing and abstracts from more than 4,000 current serial and non-serial titles. It currently includes millions of records from periodicals, conference papers, trade journals, magazines, books, patents and technical reports, with indexing back to the early 1960s. Materials covered include steels, metals, alloys, compounds and metal matrix composites.