ENVS 241: Soil Science

Technical reports (also called scientific reports) are most often produced by agencies responsible for scientific investigations of natural phenomena, problems or processes. These agencies are commonly governmental (local, state, federal, international) or educational agencies and organizations. Technical reports differ from articles in scientific journals in that technical reports usually do not undergo the same peer review process that journal articles are subject to. The review process for technical reports is a more limited process involving review within the organization that is responsible for producing the report.

Try several strategies to identify technical reports:

• Use Knox Primo with the "All I-Share Libraries" search option to identify technical reports, especially those from Illinois agencies.
• Search the USGS publications database.
• The GeoRef database indexes USGS and other technical reports. Identify reports in GeoRef and then use Google, searching by the report title, to find the full text.
• Science.gov searches for authoritative U.S. Government science information, including research and development results, from over 42 databases and over 2000 selected websites from 14 federal agencies.  
• Search state geological survey databases. See a list of state geological surveys here.

Many technical reports are freely available on the internet, and there may be links to reports from the database you searched. If the database does not present links, then try the following to get the report (in order!):

• search I-Share for the report; if it is listed, try to request it
• search Google using the title of the report
• use the library's Tipasa interlibrary loan system to obtain a copy of the report. (Note: If you haven't used ILLiad before, you will need to create an account as the first step.)