Resources for Searching Prior-Art – Technical Reports
Prior-Art – Technical Reports are documents produced by researchers detailing the results of current investigations to their organization or institution, to a funding agency, or in response to a query from an individual or group interested in the progress of a research topic. The reports are generally published by the organization or institution supporting the work, such as university departments, government agencies, research institutes, or private industry.
Sometimes, when a researcher is trying to find a reference related to some complex technology, the traditional prior-art sources may not be enough. These technical disclosures are often very detailed and provide even minute details about a subject matter.
Many of the sites listed below help in identifying reports from various universities and research institutes. They provide citations and, in some instances, abstracts to the report. Some sites offer access to the reports either by the web or they may be purchased for a fee from the publisher.
Search technical report servers maintained by various NASA centers and programs. Includes subjects such as computer science, aeronautics, astronomy, environmental science and space research.
This repository creates a single site to which researchers from the whole field of computing can submit reports, and has been integrated into the collection of over 20,000 computer science research reports and other material available through NCSTRL and will be linked with the ACM Digital Library.
- NTIS National Technical Reports Library
The NTRL database includes reports from government sponsored U.S. and worldwide scientific, technical, engineering, and business fields. You can also search technical reports from individual US Departments:
- Department of Defense: Technical Information Center
- Department of Energy: SciTech Connect
- Environmental Protection Agency: National Service Center for Environmental Publications
This database provides technical reports written by members of the IBM Research community. Some reports are available for download. Once a technical report is published in either a journal or conference proceedings, it is sometimes replaced with a reference to the external source.
This database provides abstracts and full texts of HP Labs Technical Reports from 1990 – present.
This hypertext bibliography created by D.M. Jones contains abstracts and author links to papers published in the Journal of the ACM since 1954.