Mechanical Engineering

Technical reports are intended to present the progress or results of scientific or technical research and development to sponsors, or employers, such as the federal government. They are useful for finding information on current research and research that is conducted outside of the academic publishing world. Unlike journal articles, technical reports are usually not peer reviewed and are not published through traditional publishing channels, they are considered to be "grey literature." This can make it more difficult to find technical reports as the agency or sponsor may not make reports available online. 

There are multiple resources for locating technical reports and depending on what your are looking for you may need to consult several sources. Reports can be found in Summon, but they may be catalogued as books and certainly not all reports can be found in a Summon search. Similar to selecting an appropriate subject database, choosing the right technical report resource may depend on the topic you are searching. 

This is not an exhaustive list. If you cannot find what you are looking for through one of the resources on this page, contact the librarian listed in this guide or reach out to your subject librarian for help. 

Google can be useful for searching the websites of government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community groups and companies to find press releases, reports, policy documents, etc.

Here are a few commands to focus your search. You can also use the Google Advanced search if you can't remember the commands.

• Keyword search in the webpage title only: allintitle: first nations stormwater
• Phrase search using quotation marks: "first nations"
• Restrict search to a specific website or domain: "first nations" stormwater site:gov.bc.ca
• File Format search. "first nations" stormwater: filetype:pdf. This will locate only documents published as PDFs. 

Note: To remove AI summaries in your Google search results add -AI at the end of your search.