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Technical reports, technical reports: a definition, search engines & databases, technical report repositories - multi-disciplinary, technical report repositories - topical.

"A technical report is a document that describes the process, progress, or results of technical or scientific research or the state of a technical or scientific research problem. It might also include recommendations and conclusions of the research."      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_report

Technical reports are produced by corporations, academic institutions, and government agencies at all levels of government, e.g. state, federal, and international.  Technical reports are not included in formal publication and distribution channels and therefore fall into the category of grey literature .

  • Science.gov Searches over 60 databases and over 2,200 scientific websites hosted by U.S. federal government agencies. Not limited to tech reports.
  • WorldWideScience.org A global science gateway comprised of national and international scientific databases and portals, providing real-time searching and translation of globally-dispersed multilingual scientific literature.
  • Open Grey System for Information on Grey Literature in Europe, is your open access to 700.000 bibliographical references. more... less... OpenGrey covers Science, Technology, Biomedical Science, Economics, Social Science and Humanities.
  • National Technical Reports Library (NTRL) This link opens in a new window The National Technical Reports Library provides indexing and access to a collection of more than two million historical and current government technical reports of U.S. government-sponsored research. Full-text available for 700,000 of the 2.2 million items described. Dates covered include 1900-present.
  • Argonne National Lab: Scientific Publications While sponsored by the US Dept of Energy, research at Argonne National Laboratory is wide ranging (see Research Index )
  • Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) The Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC®) has served the information needs of the Defense community for more than 65 years. It provides technical research, development, testing & evaluation information; including but not limited to: journal articles, conference proceedings, test results, theses and dissertations, studies & analyses, and technical reports & memos.
  • HathiTrust This repository of books digitized by member libraries includes a large number of technical reports. Search by keywords, specific report title, or identifiers.
  • Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) LBNL a multiprogram science lab in the national laboratory system supported by the U.S. Department of Energy through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines.
  • National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) NIST is one of the nation's oldest physical science laboratories.
  • RAND Corporation RAND's research and analysis address issues that impact people around the world including security, health, education, sustainability, growth, and development. Much of this research is carried out on behalf of public and private grantors and clients.
  • TRAIL Technical Report Archive & Image Library Identifies, acquires, catalogs, digitizes and provides unrestricted access to U.S. government agency technical reports. TRAIL is a membership organization . more... less... Majority of content is pre-1976, but some reports after that date are included.

Aerospace / Aviation

  • Contrails 20th century aerospace research, hosted at the Illinois Institute of Technology
  • Jet Propulsion Laboratory Technical Reports Server repository for digital copies of technical publications authored by JPL employees. It includes preprints, meeting papers, conference presentations, some articles, and other publications cleared for external distribution from 1992 to the present.
  • NTRS - NASA Technical Reports Server The NASA STI Repository (also known as the NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)) provides access to NASA metadata records, full-text online documents, images, and videos. The types of information included are conference papers, journal articles, meeting papers, patents, research reports, images, movies, and technical videos – scientific and technical information (STI) created or funded by NASA. Includes NTIS reports.

Computing Research

  • Computing Research Repository
  • IBM Technical Paper Archive
  • Microsoft Research
  • INIS International Nuclear Information System One of the world's largest collections of published information on the peaceful uses of nuclear science and technology.
  • Oak Ridge National Laboratory Research Library Primary subject areas covered include chemistry, physics, materials science, biological and environmental sciences, computer science, mathematics, engineering, nuclear technology, and homeland security.
  • OSTI.gov The primary search tool for DOE science, technology, and engineering research and development results more... less... over 70 years of research results from DOE and its predecessor agencies. Research results include journal articles/accepted manuscripts and related metadata; technical reports; scientific research datasets and collections; scientific software; patents; conference and workshop papers; books and theses; and multimedia
  • OSTI Open Net Provides access to over 495,000 bibliographic references and 147,000 recently declassified documents, including information declassified in response to Freedom of Information Act requests. In addition to these documents, OpenNet references older document collections from several DOE sources.

Environment

  • National Service Center for Environmental Publications From the Environmental Protection Agency
  • US Army Corp of Engineers (USACE) Digital Library See in particular the option to search technical reports by the Waterways Experiment Station, Engineering Research and Development Center, and districts .
  • National Clearinghouse for Science, Technology and the Law (NCSTL) Forensic research at the intersection of science, technology and law.

Transportation

  • ROSA-P National Transportation Library Full-text digital publications, datasets, and other resources. Legacy print materials that have been digitized are collected if they have historic, technical, or national significance.
  • Last Updated: Aug 29, 2024 12:10 PM
  • URL: https://libguides.northwestern.edu/techreports

Bit Blog

Technical Report: What is it & How to Write it? (Steps & Structure Included)

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A technical report can either act as a cherry on top of your project or can ruin the entire dough.

Everything depends on how you write and present it.

A technical report is a sole medium through which the audience and readers of your project can understand the entire process of your research or experimentation.

So, you basically have to write a report on how you managed to do that research, steps you followed, events that occurred, etc., taking the reader from the ideation of the process and then to the conclusion or findings.

Sounds exhausting, doesn’t it?

Well hopefully after reading this entire article, it won’t.

A girl writing a technical report

However, note that there is no specific standard determined to write a technical report. It depends on the type of project and the preference of your project supervisor.

With that in mind, let’s dig right in!

What is a Technical Report? (Definition)

A technical report is described as a written scientific document that conveys information about technical research in an objective and fact-based manner. This technical report consists of the three key features of a research i.e process, progress, and results associated with it.

Some common areas in which technical reports are used are agriculture, engineering, physical, and biomedical science. So, such complicated information must be conveyed by a report that is easily readable and efficient.

Now, how do we decide on the readability level?

The answer is simple – by knowing our target audience.

A technical report is considered as a product that comes with your research, like a guide for it.

Bit.ai Home Page CTA

You study the target audience of a product before creating it, right?

Similarly, before writing a technical report, you must keep in mind who your reader is going to be.

Whether it is professors, industry professionals, or even customers looking to buy your project – studying the target audience enables you to start structuring your report. It gives you an idea of the existing knowledge level of the reader and how much information you need to put in the report.

Many people tend to put in fewer efforts in the report than what they did in the actual research..which is only fair.

We mean, you’ve already worked so much, why should you go through the entire process again to create a report?

Well then, let’s move to the second section where we talk about why it is absolutely essential to write a technical report accompanying your project.

Read more:  What is a Progress Report and How to Write One?

Importance of Writing a Technical Report 

1. efficient communication.

Technical reports are used by industries to convey pertinent information to upper management. This information is then used to make crucial decisions that would impact the company in the future.

Technical team communicating with each other

Examples of such technical reports include proposals, regulations, manuals, procedures, requests, progress reports, emails, and memos.

2. Evidence for your work

Most of the technical work is backed by software.

However, graduation projects are not.

So, if you’re a student, your technical report acts as the sole evidence of your work. It shows the steps you took for the research and glorifies your efforts for a better evaluation.

3. Organizes the data 

A technical report is a concise, factual piece of information that is aligned and designed in a standard manner. It is the one place where all the data of a project is written in a compact manner that is easily understandable by a reader.

4. Tool for evaluation of your work 

Professors and supervisors mainly evaluate your research project based on the technical write-up for it. If your report is accurate, clear, and comprehensible, you will surely bag a good grade.

A technical report to research is like Robin to Batman.

Best results occur when both of them work together.

So, how can you write a technical report that leaves the readers in a ‘wow’ mode? Let’s find out!

How to Write a Technical Report? 

Writing a technical report can feel daunting, but it becomes much more manageable when you break it down into clear steps. This guide will equip you with the knowledge to craft a clear, impactful report that effectively communicates your findings.

Step 1: Understand the Purpose and Audience

The first step is to understand the purpose and audience. What is the goal of your report? Are you aiming to inform, persuade, or explain a technical concept? Identifying your objective will steer the direction and content of your report.

Equally important is knowing your readers. Who will be consuming your report? Are they colleagues with a deep technical background or stakeholders with a broader understanding? Tailoring the language and technical depth to their level is crucial for successful communication.

Step 2: Gather and Organize Information

Once you understand your mission and audience, it’s time to gather your resources. This includes research findings, experimental data, technical specifications, or case studies relevant to your topic. Ensure you have all the necessary evidence and references to support your conclusions.

As you gather this information, organize it methodically. Create an outline using clear headings to structure your report. A common structure includes an introduction, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion, and optional recommendations.

Typical sections include:

  • Table of Contents
  • Introduction
  • Methodology
  • Appendices (if necessary)

An outline acts as a roadmap, ensuring you cover all necessary points logically.

A lady creating table of contents in a technical report

Step 3: Write the Introduction

Writing the introduction of a technical report is a crucial step in effectively conveying the purpose and scope of your work to the reader. The introduction sets the stage for the rest of the document, providing context, background information, and an overview of the report’s objectives.

1. Begin with a Hook

Just like any good piece of writing, your introduction should start with a hook to grab the reader’s attention. This could be a startling statistic, an intriguing question, or a relevant quote. The goal is to engage your audience right from the start.

2. Provide Background Information

After capturing the reader’s attention, provide some background information that sets the context for your report. This section should give the reader a brief overview of the topic and explain why it is important. Include relevant historical data, recent developments, or industry trends that highlight the significance of your study.

3. State the Purpose and Objectives

Clearly state the purpose of your report and outline its main objectives. This helps the reader understand what to expect and sets the direction for the rest of the document. Be concise but specific about what your report aims to achieve.

4. Define the Scope

It’s important to define the scope of your report so that the reader knows what is included and what is not. This section should outline the boundaries of your study, including any limitations or exclusions. Defining the scope helps manage reader expectations and keeps your report focused.

Step 4: Describe the Methodology

The methodology section is like a transparent blueprint. Here, you detail the methods and procedures used to gather data and conduct analysis. The description should be specific enough that someone could replicate your work.

1. Outline Your Research Design

Start by outlining your research design. This is the overall strategy you used to integrate the different components of your study in a coherent and logical way. Here are some points to consider:

  • Type of Study: Is it experimental, observational, qualitative, quantitative, or a mix of these?
  • Approach: Did you use a case study, survey, field research, or laboratory experiment?

2. Describe Your Procedures

Detail the procedures you followed in conducting your research or project. This includes:

  • Steps Taken: List the steps in chronological order.
  • Tools and Materials: Specify any tools, instruments, or materials used.
  • Protocol: Describe any specific protocols or guidelines followed.

3. Explain Data Collection Methods

How did you gather your data? Provide detailed information about your data collection methods:

  • Sampling: Explain your sampling method and why you chose it.
  • Data Sources: Describe the sources from which you collected data.
  • Collection Techniques: Discuss techniques used (e.g., surveys, interviews, observations).

4. Detail Data Analysis Procedures

After data collection, what did you do next? Explain how you processed and analyzed the data:

  • Analytical Tools: Specify any software or tools used for analysis.
  • Techniques: Describe the statistical or qualitative techniques applied.
  • Steps: Outline the steps followed in the analysis process.

5. Address Limitations

No study is perfect. Discuss any limitations in your methodology that could affect your results:

  • Constraints: Mention any constraints (time, budget, access to resources).
  • Biases: Identify potential biases or sources of error.
  • Impact: Explain how these limitations might impact your findings.

Step 5: Present the Results

Presenting results is a critical step in writing a technical report. This section showcases the outcomes of your work and forms the core of your report. It’s where your data, analysis, and insights come together to tell a coherent story.

1. Structure Your Results Section

Organize by Objectives or Hypotheses:

  • Align your results with the objectives or hypotheses stated in your introduction. This ensures clarity and continuity.
  • If you had multiple objectives, present the results corresponding to each one in separate subsections.
  • Use Subheadings: Break down your results into logical subsections using descriptive subheadings. This helps the reader navigate through your findings easily.

2. Present Data Effectively

  • Utilize tables, graphs, and charts to present data visually. These tools can make complex data more understandable and highlight key trends and patterns.
  • Ensure all tables and figures are clearly labeled and referenced in the text. Each should have a number (e.g., Table 1, Figure 2) and a descriptive caption.
  • Supplement visual data with clear and concise narrative descriptions. Explain what the data shows and highlight significant findings.
  • Avoid simply repeating what is shown in tables and figures. Instead, focus on interpreting the data.

3. Highlight Key Findings

  • Point out the most important and relevant results. These are the findings that directly address your research questions or objectives.
  • Use bullet points or numbered lists to highlight key findings for easy reference.
  • If applicable, discuss the statistical significance of your results. Mention p-values, confidence intervals, or other statistical measures to validate your findings.

4. Discuss Trends and Patterns

  • Look for and discuss any trends or patterns in your data. Are there any recurring themes or consistent changes over time?
  • Highlight any unexpected results and offer possible explanations for them.
  • Compare your results with previous studies or baseline data. This can provide context and underscore the significance of your findings.

5. Ensure Clarity and Precision

  • Use clear and straightforward language. Avoid jargon and complex sentences that might confuse the reader.
  • Be precise in your descriptions. Provide exact numbers, percentages, and units of measurement.
  • Present your results objectively without over-interpretation. Stick to what the data shows and save broader implications and interpretations for the discussion section.

6. Use Visual Aids Appropriately

  • Choose the right type of visual aid for your data. Use bar charts for comparisons, line graphs for trends, pie charts for proportions, and tables for detailed data.
  • Ensure your visual aids are of high quality and easy to read. Use appropriate scales, labels, and legends.
  • Keep them simple and avoid clutter. A well-designed visual aid can significantly enhance understanding.

Avoid interpreting the results in this section; save that for the discussion.

Step 6: Discuss the Findings

The discussion section goes beyond just presenting the results. Here, you delve deeper by interpreting and explaining their meaning and implications. Relate your findings to existing research or established theories and discuss any discrepancies or unexpected outcomes.

Explain how your results contribute to the field or address the problem stated in the introduction. Don’t forget to acknowledge any limitations of your study and suggest areas for future research or improvements. This strengthens your report and demonstrates a well-rounded understanding of the topic.

Step 7: Conclude and Recommend

Finally, conclude with clarity and recommendations. Summarize the main points of your report and restate their importance. Avoid introducing new information here. If applicable, provide clear and concise recommendations based on your findings.

Offer practical solutions or propose next steps. The conclusion should leave a lasting impression, solidifying the reader’s understanding of the report’s significance and its takeaways.

Final Tips:

  • Proofread and Edit: Carefully review your report for clarity, coherence, and conciseness. Check for grammatical errors and ensure that all technical terms are used correctly.
  • Include References: List all sources cited in your report, following the appropriate citation style.
  • Appendices: Add any additional material that supports your report, such as raw data, detailed calculations, or supplementary information, in the appendices.

Employees analysing sales report

AND VOILA! You’re done.

…and don’t worry, if the above process seems like too much for you, Bit.ai is here to help.

Read more:  Technical Manual: What, Types & How to Create One? (Steps Included)

Bit.ai : The Ultimate Tool for Writing Technical Reports

Bit.ai: Tool to create technical reports

What if we tell you that the entire structure of a technical report explained in this article is already done and designed for you!

Yes, you read that right.

With Bit.ai’s 70+ templates , all you have to do is insert your text in a pre-formatted document that has been designed to appeal to the creative nerve of the reader.

Bit features infographic

You can even add collaborators who can proofread or edit your work in real-time. You can also highlight text, @mention collaborators, and make comments!

Wait, there’s more! When you send your document to the evaluators, you can even trace who read it, how much time they spent on it, and more.

Exciting, isn’t it?

Start making your fabulous technical report with Bit.ai today!

Few technical documents templates you might be interested in:

  • Status Report Template
  • API Documentation
  • Product Requirements Document Template
  • Software Design Document Template
  • Software Requirements Document Template
  • UX Research Template
  • Issue Tracker Template
  • Release Notes Template
  • Statement of Work
  • Scope of Work Template

Wrap up(Conclusion)

A well structured and designed report adds credibility to your research work. You can rely on bit.ai for that part.

However, the content is still yours so remember to make it worth it.

After finishing up your report, ask yourself:

Does the abstract summarize the objectives and methods employed in the paper?

Are the objective questions answered in your conclusion?

What are the implications of the findings and how is your work making a change in the way that particular topic is read and conceived?

If you find logical answers to these, then you have done a good job!

Remember, writing isn’t an overnight process. ideas won’t just arrive. Give yourself space and time for inspiration to strike and then write it down. Good writing has no shortcuts, it takes practice.

But at least now that you’ve bit.ai in the back of your pocket, you don’t have to worry about the design and formatting!

Have you written any technical reports before? If yes, what tools did you use? Do let us know by tweeting us @bit_docs.

Further reads:

How To Create An Effective Status Report?

7 Types of Reports Your Business Certainly Needs!

What is Project Status Report Documentation?

Scientific Paper: What is it & How to Write it? (Steps and Format)

  Business Report: What is it & How to Write it? (Steps & Format)

How to Write Project Reports that ‘Wow’ Your Clients? (Template Included)

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Business Report: What is it & How to Write it? (Steps & Format)

Internship Cover Letter: How to Write a Perfect one?

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Tips for Writing Technical Papers

Jennifer widom , january 2006, running example, paper title, the abstract, the introduction, related work, performance experiments, the conclusions, future work, the acknowledgements, grammar and small-scale presentation issues, versions and distribution.

Basics of scientific and technical writing

  • Career Central
  • Published: 01 March 2021
  • Volume 46 , pages 284–286, ( 2021 )

Cite this article

research paper for technical report

  • Morteza Monavarian 1 , 2  

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3 Citations

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Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction to scientific/technical writing

Scientific/technical writing is an essential part of research. The outcome of a research activity should be shared with others in the form of scientific paper publications; some ideas require a patent to reserve the implementation rights; and almost any research activity requires a funding source, for which a grant proposal is necessary. Therefore, it is crucial to know the differences among writing papers, patents, and grant proposals and how to prepare them in a research environment ( Figure 1 ).

figure 1

Three major types of scientific/technical writing covered in the three-part series.

The publication of papers is a standard way to share knowledge and transfer methods in scientific communities, thus a pivotal part of any research activity, especially in an academic environment. In industry, where financial profit is a key factor, patents are possibly more favorable.

Types of paper publications

There are different types of paper publications, depending on the content, audience, purpose, length, and scope: original research, review articles, invited articles, conference proceedings, comments/errata, and press releases ( Figure 2 ).

Original research articles may be published in journals or conference proceedings (or preprints in arXiv) and target specific audiences within a field of research. Journal research papers require peer review that typically involves an editor and two reviewers. For conference proceedings, there is usually no direct peer-review process, but the work has to be presented in the corresponding conference to be eligible for publication.

In contrast to original research articles, which are written on special topics within a field of research, review articles normally cover an overview of research and tend to be longer. Review articles do not necessarily reflect on novel data or ideas and could be similar to a book chapter. However, unlike review articles, book chapters or books are usually written when the target field of research is fully established. In a review paper, figures are typically not original and reprinted from other publications, for which a copyright permission from the original publishing journal is required.

Invited articles are written in response to an invitation by a journal editor or a conference organizer in a specific field of research or for a special issue. An invited article could be a review article or original research. Invited articles are normally written by peers or researchers with significant contributions to a field of research.

Other items published include comments or errata. The purpose of a comment on a published article is to bring points of criticism to the attention of the readers as well as the authors of the original article. The comments can be published in the same journal as the original paper. Errata correct mistakes in an article after publication.

Finally, press releases target a more general audience and normally report on a review/overview of recently published research. The author of the press release is not the same as that of the original article. Unlike peer-reviewed research articles, press release articles are usually not citable.

figure 2

Six major types of paper publications.

Writing structures and styles

Different articles have different structures. A research article typically consists of a title, author list and affiliations, abstract, main body, conclusions, acknowledgments, and references.

A good title should be concise, to the point, and free of abbreviations. Author lists and affiliations include whoever has intellectually contributed to the paper (identifying at least one corresponding author and email address), with the order approved by all of the co-authors. A good abstract should give a full, but short, overview of the work with both qualitative and quantitative data summaries. An abstract should be self-contained, meaning it should not require a referral to a reference or figure. Abstracts are usually written in the present tense and have an active voice.

Unlike letters with no sections within the main body, the main body of research articles normally contains several sections (e.g., introduction, methods and approach, results, and discussions). The introduction should contain a deep literature review of the field as the basis for motivating the current work. The last paragraph of the introduction usually summarizes what to expect from the article. The following sections will demonstrate study methods, results, and discussions/interpretations of the results, including plots, tables, and figures.

Conclusions summarize the findings of the paper and may point out any future directions. The acknowledgment lists all funding support and gratitude toward anyone who helped with the work, not including those listed as co-authors. The reference section lists all references in a format described in the journal submission guidelines. Using reference management software (such as Zotero, Mendeley, BibTex) makes organizing the references less cumbersome. A good scholarly research article should have citations for almost any claims made within the main body, to ensure proper connections to the prior research in the field.

Unlike patents, papers require a deep scientific background and should be straight to the point. While patents include all aspects of the idea, papers typically have space limitations, so should therefore be concise. The data in research articles should speak for itself. The language of a research paper should be clear and simple and not include metaphors or slang.

Where to submit

The submission target depends on several factors: (1) scope of the journal, (2) length of the paper (letters versus regular length articles), (3) access (regular versus open access), and (4) impact factor (IF). The scope of the journal is probably the first thing to consider; you cannot publish a biological paper in a humanity journal. Regarding length, a letter is much shorter and usually does not have section headings. It depends on the discipline, but sometimes letters are more favorable because of the shorter publication time, preparation simplicity, and more readability (takes less time to read, which may also improve the visibility of the paper). In terms of access, you may pay publication charges to receive open access, or some journals charge publication fees upon acceptance. Open access papers could potentially get more visibility than normal publications.

IF is a specific journal parameter indicating the average number of citations per published article over a certain period of time. Paying serious attention to IF could oppose the mission of science itself, as it could mean that you judge a paper only by where it is being published and not by its intrinsic values (also called high IF syndrome).

Submission, peer-review, and decisions

Your article will enter the peer-review process upon submission. If done properly, the peer-review process not only avoids false or inconsistent data from being published (and helps science in this regard), but also improves your paper and removes any potential errors/issues or vague discussion. During submission, some journals may ask you to include/exclude reviewers. If there are researchers who may have a direct conflict with your work, you may list them as excluded reviewers. You may also suggest to include reviewers who have relevant experience.

Serving as a reviewer may help you with your own writing, as it assists in developing critical thinking. However, for the sake of science, try peer-reviewing for lesser-known journals (the high-impact journals already have many reviewers). Decisions on your article could be (1) reject: cannot be accepted to this journal; (2) referral to other journals; submit to another journal; (3) accept: accepted as is; (4) major revisions: not accepted, but could be accepted upon significant improvement (upon approval from reviewers); and (5) minor revision: accept but needs slight revisions (no need to go through a peer review again).

Copyrights and archiving

Most journals obtain copyrights from the authors before submission via a copyright transfer form. Hence, re-publishing the same data and plots in another journal is often forbidden. Also, the language of a paper should have a significant difference from an already published paper to avoid plagiarism. In the case where some content (e.g., figure or table) needs to be re-published in another paper (e.g., for review articles or thesis/dissertations), one can request a copyright permission from the original publishing journal. Also, archiving of one’s published papers in personal profile websites (e.g., Researchgate or LinkedIn) is usually forbidden, unless the paper is published as open access.

Final tips for paper publication

Read, read, read! There is probably no better way of improving writing skills than reading other articles and books.

Make illustrative and self-contained figures that can stand on their own.

Know your audience when selecting a journal. Find out which journals are normally targeted by people in your research community.

Protect yourself from high impact factor (IF) syndrome. Journals with a high IF may have very subjective decision criteria. It is sometimes more important to have your paper published than to spend a couple of years waiting for publication in a high-impact journal.

Serve as a reviewer. Get a sense of how a peer-review process feels in order to establish critical thinking. Before submitting your article, self-review.

Look forward to a constructive peer review. It definitely improves your paper (always good to have a view from different perspective).

Enjoy your publications!

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Materials Department, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Morteza Monavarian

Solid State Lighting & Energy Electronics Center, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

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Additional information

This article is the first in a three-part series in MRS Bulletin that will focus on writing papers, patents, and proposals.

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Monavarian, M. Basics of scientific and technical writing. MRS Bulletin 46 , 284–286 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1557/s43577-021-00070-y

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Published : 01 March 2021

Issue Date : March 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1557/s43577-021-00070-y

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How to write a technical paper or a research paper

By michael ernst, april, 2005 last updated: july 1, 2024, which details to include, make the organization and results clear, getting started: overcoming writer's block and procrastination, writing style, computer program source code, numbers and measurements, processing data, related work, when to submit your paper for publication, responding to conference reviews, norman ramsey's advice, other resources, introduction.

This document describes several simple, concrete ways to improve your writing, by avoiding some common mistakes. The end of this document contains more resources for improving your writing.

Some people believe that writing papers, giving talks , and similar “marketing” activities are not part of research, but an adjunct to it or even an undesirable distraction. This view is inaccurate. The purpose of research is to increase the store of human knowledge, and so even the very best work is useless if you cannot effectively communicate it to the rest of the world. If a paper is poorly written, then readers might conclude you spent as little effort on the research that it describes.

Equally importantly, writing papers and giving talks will clarify your thinking and thereby improve your research. You may be surprised how difficult it is to clearly communicate your ideas and contributions; doing so will force you to understand them more deeply and enable you to improve them.

Know your message, and stay on message

The goal of writing a paper is to change people's behavior: for instance, to change the way they think about a research problem or to convince them to use a new approach. Determine your goal (also known as your thesis), and focus the paper around that goal.

As a general rule, your paper needs to convince the audience of three key points. If any of these is missing or unclear, the paper will not be compelling.

  • The problem is important . The problem has a significant impact and consequences. You can buttress your argument by showing that others consider the problem important.
  • The problem is hard . Explain that obvious techniques and existing approaches do not suffice. Showing what others have tried can be effective here.
  • You have solved the problem. This is often demonstrated via experiments. Keep in mind how you expect the behavior of readers to change once they appreciate your contributions. You'll also need to convince readers that your contributions are novel. When expressing this, it is helpful to explain why no one else thought of your approach before (or why, if they thought of it, they would have rejected the approach) , and whether similar insights apply to other problems.

Before you write your paper, you need to understand your audience. Who will read your paper? What are their backgrounds, motivations, interests, and beliefs? What are the key points you want a reader person to take away from your paper? Once you know the thesis and audience, you can determine what points your document should make to achieve its purpose.

For each point in your paper, you need to explain both what and why . Start with what, but don't omit why. For example, it is not enough to state how an algorithm works; you should explain why it works in that way, or why another way of solving the problem would be different. Similarly, it is not sufficient to present a figure or facts. You must also ensure that reader understands the significance or implications of the figure and what parts of it are most important.

Your purpose is to communicate specific ideas, and everything about your paper should contribute to this goal. If any part of the paper does not support your main point, then delete or change that part. You must be ruthless in cutting every irrelevant detail, however true it may be. Everything in your paper that does not support your main point distracts from it.

Write for the readers, rather than writing for yourself. In particular, think about what matters to the intended audience, and focus on that. It is not necessarily what you personally find most intriguing.

A common mistake is to focus on what you spent the most time on. Do not write your paper as a chronological narrative of all the things that you tried, and do not devote space in the paper proportionately to the amount of time you spent on each task. Most work that you do will never show up in any paper; the purpose of infrastructure-building and exploration of blind alleys is to enable you to do the small amount of work that is worth writing about. Another way of stating this is that the purpose of the paper is not to describe what you have done, but to inform readers of the successful outcome or significant results, and to convince readers of the validity of those conclusions.

Likewise, do not dwell on details of the implementation or the experiments except insofar as they contribute to your main point. This is a particularly important piece of advice for software documentation, where you need to focus on the software's benefits to the user, and how to use it, rather than how you implemented it. However, it holds for technical papers as well — and remember that readers expect different things from the two types of writing!

The audience is interested in what worked, and why, so start with that. If you discuss approaches that were not successful, do so briefly, and typically only after you have discussed the successful approach. Furthermore, the discussion should focus on differences from the successful technique, and if at all possible should provide general rules or lessons learned that will yield insight and help others to avoid such blind alleys in the future.

Whenever you introduce a strawman or an inferior approach, say so upfront. A reader will (and should) assume that whatever you write in a paper is something you believe or advocate, unless very clearly marked otherwise. A paper should never first detail a technique, then (without forewarning) indicate that the technique is flawed and proceed to discuss another technique. Such surprises confuse and irritate readers. This mistake is often called “leading the reader down the garden path”.

When there are multiple possible approaches to a problem, it is preferable to give the best or successful one first. Oftentimes it is not even necessary to discuss the alternatives. If you do, they should generally come after, not before, the successful one. Your paper should give the most important details first, and the less important ones afterward. Its main line of argument should flow coherently rather than being interrupted. It can be acceptable to state an imperfect solution first (with a clear indication that it is imperfect) if it is a simpler version of the full solution, and the full solution is a direct modification of the simpler one. Less commonly, it can be acceptable to state an imperfect solution first if it is an obvious solution that every reader will assume is adequate; but use care with this rationalization, since you are usually wrong that every reader will jump to the given conclusion.

A paper should communicate the main ideas of your research (such as the techniques and results) early and clearly. Then, the body of the paper can expand on these points; a reader who understands the structure and big ideas can better appreciate the details. Another way of saying this is that you should give away the punchline. A technical paper is not a joke or a mystery novel. The reader should not encounter any surprises, only deeper explanations of ideas that have already been introduced. It's particularly irritating when an abstract or introduction states, “We evaluated the relationship between baldness and beekeeping”, with the key results buried pages later. A better abstract would say, “Male beekeepers are 25% more likely to be bald (p=.04), but there is no statistically significant correlation for female beekeepers.”

The same advice applies at the level of sections and paragraphs. It is a bad approach to start with a mass of details and only at the end tell the reader what the main point was or how the details related to one another. Instead, state the point first and then support it. The reader is more likely to appreciate which evidence is important and why, and is less likely to become confused or frustrated.

For each section of the paper, consider writing a mini-introduction that says what its organization is, what is in each subpart, and how the parts relate to one another. For the whole paper, this is probably a paragraph. For a section or sub-section, it can be as short as a sentence. This may feel redundant to you (the author), but readers haven't spent as much time with the paper's structure as you have, so they will truly appreciate these signposts that orient them within your text.

Some people like to write the abstract, and often also the introduction, last. Doing so makes them easier to write, because the rest of the paper is already complete and can just be described. However, I prefer to write these sections early in the process (and then revise them as needed), because they frame the paper. If you know the paper's organization and outlook, then writing the front matter will take little effort. If you don't, then it is an excellent use of your time to determine that information by writing the front matter. To write the body of the paper without knowing its broad outlines will take more time in the long run. Another way of putting this is that writing the paper first will make writing the abstract faster, and writing the abstract first will make writing the paper faster. There is a lot more paper than abstract, so it makes sense to start with that and to clarify the point of the paper early on.

It is a very common error to dive into the technical approach or the implementation details without first appropriately framing the problem and providing motivation and background. Readers need to understand what the task is before they are convinced that they should pay attention to what you are saying about it. You should first say what the problem or goal is, and — even when presenting an algorithm — first state what the output is and probably the key idea, before discussing steps. Avoid providing information that isn't useful to readers/users. It just distracts from the important content.

Some writers are overwhelmed by the emptiness of a blank page or editor buffer, and they have trouble getting started with their writing. Don't worry! Here are some tricks to help you get started. Once you have begun, you will find it relatively easier to revise your notes or first draft. The key idea is to write something , and you can improve it later.

Start verbally . Explain what the paper needs to say to another person. After the conversation is over, write down what you just said, focusing on the main points rather than every word you spoke. Many people find it easier to speak than to write. Furthermore, getting feedback and giving clarifications will help you discover problems with your argument, explanation, or word choice.

Outline . You may not be ready to write full English paragraphs, but you can decide which sections your paper will have and give them descriptive titles. Once you have decided on the section structure, you can write a little outline of each section, which indicates the subsection titles. Now, expand that into a topic sentence for each paragraph. At this point, since you know the exact topic of each paragraph, you will find the paragraph easy to write.

Stream-of-consciousness notes . Write down everything that you know, in no particular order and with no particular formatting. Afterward, organize what you wrote thematically, bringing related points together. Eventually, convert it into an outline and proceed as above. While writing notes, use phrases/keywords, not complete sentences. The phrases are quicker to write and less likely to derail your brainstorming; they are easier to organize; and you will feel less attached to them and more willing to delete them.

Divide and conquer . Rather than trying to write your entire document, choose some specific part, and write just that part. Then, move on to another part.

Re-use . Find other text that you have written on the topic and start from that. An excellent source is your progress reports — you are writing them, aren't you? This can remind you what was hard or interesting, or of points that you might otherwise forget to make. You will rarely want to re-use text verbatim, both because you can probably convey the point better now, and also because writing for different audiences or in different contexts requires a different argument or phrasing. For example, a technical paper and a technical talk have similar aims but rather different forms.

You must be willing to delete and/or rewrite your notes and early drafts. If you wrote something once, you can write it again (probably better!). Early on, the point is to organize your ideas, not to create finished sentences.

Be brief. Make every word count. If a word does not support your point, cut it out, because excess verbiage and fluff only make it harder for the reader to appreciate your message. Use shorter and more direct phrases wherever possible.

Make your writing crisp and to the point. Eliminate any text that does not support your point. Here is one way you might go about this; it is time-consuming but extremely effective. First, examine each section of the paper in turn and ask what role it serves and whether it contributes to the paper's main point. If not, delete it. Next, within each section, examine each paragraph. Ask whether that paragraph has a single point. If not, rewrite the paragraph. Also ask whether that point contributes to the goals of the section. If not, then delete the paragraph. Next, within each paragraph, examine each sentence. If it does not make a single, clear point that strengthens the paragraph, delete or rewrite it. Finally, within each sentence, examine each word, and delete or replace those that do not strengthen their point. You will need to repeat this entire process multiple times, keeping a fresh perspective on the paper.

Some people find it easier to follow this approach bottom-up, first cutting/rewriting words, then sentences, etc.

Passive voice has no place in technical writing. It obscures who the actor was, what caused it, and when it happened. Use active voice and simple, clear, direct phrasing.

First person is rarely appropriate in technical writing.

  • First person is appropriate when describing something that the author of the paper did manually. Recall that your paper should not be couched as a narrative.
  • Do not use “we” to mean “the author and the reader” or “the paper”. For example, do not write “In this section, we ...”.
  • Do not use “we” to describe the operation of a program or system. “We compute a graph” makes it sound like the authors did it by hand. As a related point, do not anthropomorphize computers: they hate it. Anthropomorphism, such as “the program thinks that ...”, is unclear and vague.

Avoid puffery, self-congratulation, superlatives, and subjective or value judgments: give the objective facts and let the reader judge. Avoid vague terms like “sizable” and “significant” (which are also subjective). Don't overuse the word “novel”. When I see a paper that is full of these, my rule of thumb is that the paper is trying too hard to cover up for scanty evidence.

Do not use words like “clearly”, “easily”, “obviously”, and “trivially”, as in “Obviously, this Taylor series sums to π.” If the point is really obvious, then you are just wasting words by pointing it out. And if the point is not obvious to readers who are not intimately familiar with the subject matter the way you are, then you are offending readers by insulting their intelligence, and you are demonstrating your own inability to communicate the intuition.

Prefer singular to plural number. In “sequences induce graphs”, it is not clear whether the two collections are in one-to-one correspondence, or the set of sequences collectively induces a set of graphs; “each sequence induces a graph” avoids this confusion. Likewise, in “graphs might contain paths”, it is unclear whether a given graph might contain multiple paths, or might contain at most one path.

When describing an experiment or some other event or action that occurred in the past, use past tense . For example, the methodology section might say “We ran the program”. It would be ungrammatical and confusing to use present tense, as in “We run the program”. Present tense is for ongoing events (“I write this letter to inform you...”) or regular events (“I brush my teeth each day”), but not past events (“Yesterday, I eat dinner with my family”). It is also correct to say “Our methodology was to run the program”, where you use past tense “was” and the infinitive “to run”.

When describing the paper itself, use present tense . “This paper shows that ...”. The reason for this is that the reader is experiencing the paper in real time.

Avoid gratuitous use of the future tense “will ...”, as in, “switching the red and green wires will cause the bomb to explode”. It is unclear when the action will occur. If it is an immediate effect, use the shorter and more direct “switching the red and green wires causes the bomb to explode”.

Use “previous work” instead of “existing work”. Your work exists, so “existing work” would refer to it as well.

In a list with 3 or more elements list, put a serial comma between each of the items (including the last two). As a simple example of why, consider this 3-element grocery list written without the clarifying last comma: “milk, macaroni and cheese and crackers”. It's not clear whether that means { milk, macaroni and cheese, crackers } or { milk, macaroni, cheese and crackers }. As another example, “I would like to thank my parents, Rene Descartes and Ayn Rand,” suggests rather unusual parentage, whereas “I would like to thank my parents, Rene Descartes, and Ayn Rand,” shows a debt to four people. I've seen real examples that were even more confusing than these.

In English, compound adjectives are hyphenated (except those whose first words end with “ly”, in some style guides) but compound nouns are not. Consider “the semantics provide name protection” versus “the name-protection semantics”.

Prefer unambiguous words to ambiguous ones. Do not use “as” or “since” to mean “because”. Do not use “if” to mean “whether”.

Use quotations sparingly. A clear paraphrase of the points that are relevant to your own work (along with a proper citation) is usually better than a long quotation from a previous publication.

Avoid third-person pronouns when you can. The old standard was “he”, which is masculine chauvinist. The new standard is “he or she”, which can be viewed as heteronormative and which some people find clumsy. An emerging standard is “they” as a first-person singular pronoun, which is inclusive but grammatically incorrect and confusing (see comments above about singular vs. plural number).

Some of the suggestions in this document are about good writing, and that might seem secondary to the research. But writing more clearly will help you think more clearly and often reveals flaws (or ideas!) that had previously been invisible even to you. Furthermore, if your writing is not good, then either readers will not be able to comprehend your good ideas, or readers will be (rightly) suspicious of your technical work. If you do not (or cannot) write well, why should readers believe you were any more careful in the research itself? The writing reflects on you, so make it reflect well.

Use figures! Different people learn in different ways, so you should complement a textual or mathematical presentation with a graphical one. Even for people whose primary learning modality is textual, another presentation of the ideas can clarify, fill gaps, or enable the reader to verify his or her understanding. Figures can also help to illustrate concepts, draw a skimming reader into the text (or at least communicate a key idea to that reader). Figures make the paper more visually appealing.

It is extremely helpful to give an example to clarify your ideas: this can make concrete in the reader's mind what your technique does (and why it is hard or interesting). A running example used throughout the paper is also helpful in illustrating how your algorithm works, and a single example permits you to amortize the time and space spent explaining the example (and the reader's time in appreciating it). It's harder to find or create a single example that you re-use throughout the paper, but it is worth it.

A figure should stand on its own, containing all the information that is necessary to understand it. Good captions contain multiple sentences; the caption provides context and explanation. For examples of good, informative captions, see the print editions of magazines such as Scientific American and American Scientist . The caption should state what the figure illustrates or what conclusion a reader should draw from it. Don't write an obvious description of what the figure is, such as "Code example". Never write a caption like “The Foobar technique”; the caption should also say what the Foobar technique is, what it is good for, or how it works. The caption may also need to explain the meaning of columns in a table or of symbols in a figure. However, it's even better to put that information in the figure proper; for example, use labels or a legend. When the body of your paper contains information that belongs in a caption, there are several negative effects. The reader is forced to hunt all over the paper in order to understand the figure. The flow of the writing is interrupted with details that are relevant only when one is looking at the figure. The figures become ineffective at drawing in a reader who is scanning the paper — an important constituency that you should cater to!

As with naming , use pictorial elements consistently. Only use two different types of arrows (or boxes, shading, etc.) when they denote distinct concepts; do not introduce inconsistency just because it pleases your personal aesthetic sense. Almost any diagram with multiple types of elements requires a legend (either explicitly in the diagram, or in the caption) to explain what each one means; and so do many diagrams with just one type of element, to explain what it means.

Some writers label all the types of figures differently — some as “figure”, others as “table” or “graph” or “picture”. This differentiation has no benefits, but it does have a drawback: it is very hard for a reader to find “table 3”, which might appear after “figure 7” but before “freehand drawing 1”. You should simply call them all figures and number them sequentially. The body of each figure might be a table, a graph, a diagram, a screenshot, or any other content.

Put figures at the top of the page, not in the middle or bottom. If a numbered, captioned figure appears in the middle or at the bottom of a page, it is harder for readers to find the next paragraph of text while reading, and harder to find the figure from a reference to it.

Avoid bitmaps, which are hard to read. Export figures from your drawing program in a vector graphics format. If you must use a bitmap (which is only appropriate for screenshots of a tool), then produce them at very high resolution. Use the biggest-resolution screen you can, and magnify the portion you will capture.

Don't waste text in the paper (and tax the reader's patience) regurgitating information that is expressed more precisely and concisely in a figure. For example, the text should not repeat the numbers from a table or graph. Text in the paper should add insight or explanations, or summarize the conclusions to be drawn from the data in the figure.

Your code examples should either be real code, or should be close to real code. Never use synthetic examples such as procedures or variables named foo or bar . Made-up examples are much harder for readers to understand and to build intuition regarding. Furthermore, they give the reader the impression that your technique is not applicable in practice — you couldn't find any real examples to illustrate it, so you had to make something up.

Any boldface or other highlighting should be used to indicate the most important parts of a text. In code snippets, it should never be used to highlight syntactic elements such as “public” or “int”, because that is not the part to which you want to draw the reader's eye. (Even if your IDE happens to do that, it isn't appropriate for a paper.) For example, it would be acceptable to use boldface to indicate the names of procedures (helping the reader find them), but not their return types.

Give each concept in your paper a descriptive name to make it more memorable to readers. Never use terms like “approach 1”, “approach 2”, or “our approach”, and avoid acronyms when possible. If you can't think of a good name, then quite likely you don't really understand the concept. Think harder about it to determine its most important or salient features.

It is better to name a technique (or a paper section, etc.) based on what it does rather than how it does it.

Use terms consistently and precisely. Avoid “elegant variation”, which uses different terms for the same concept to avoid boredom on the part of the reader or to emphasize different aspects of the concept. While elegant variation may be appropriate in poems, novels, and some essays, it is not acceptable in technical writing, where you should clearly define terms when they are first introduced, then use them consistently. If you switch wording gratuitously, you will confuse the reader and muddle your point. A reader of a technical paper expects that use of a different term flags a different meaning, and will wonder what subtle difference you are trying to highlight. Thus, don't confuse the reader by substituting “program”, “library”, “component”, “system”, and “artifact”, nor by conflating “technique”, “idea”, “method” and “approach”, nor by switching among “program”, “code”, and “source”. Choose the best word for the concept, and stick with it.

Do not use a single term to refer to multiple concepts. If you use the term “technique” for every last idea that you introduce in your paper, then readers will become confused. This is a place that use of synonyms to distinguish concepts that are unrelated (from the point of view of your paper) is acceptable. For instance, you might always use “phase” when describing an algorithm but “step” when describing how a user uses a tool.

When you present a list, be consistent in how you introduce each element, and either use special formatting to make them stand out or else state the size of the list. Don't use, “There are several reasons I am smart. I am intelligent. Second, I am bright. Also, I am clever. Finally, I am brilliant.” Instead, use “There are four reasons I am smart. First, I am intelligent. Second, I am bright. Third, I am clever. Fourth, I am brilliant.” Especially when the points are longer, this makes the argument much easier to follow. Some people worry that such consistency and repetition is pedantic or stilted, or it makes the writing hard to follow. There is no need for such concerns: none of these is the case. It's more important to make your argument clear than to achieve “elegant variation” at the expense of clarity.

Choose good names not only for the concepts that you present in your paper, but for the document source file. Don't name the file after the conference to which you are submitting (the paper might be rejected) or the year. Even if the paper is accepted, such a name won't tell you what the paper is about when you look over your files in later years. Instead, give the paper or its folder/directory a name that reflects its content. Another benefit is that this will also lead you to think about the paper in terms of its content and contributions.

Here is a piece of advice that is specific to computing: do not use the vague, nontechnical term “bug”. Instead, use one of the standard terms fault, error, or failure. A fault is an underlying defect in a system, introduced by a human. A failure is a user-visible manifestation of the fault or defect. In other circumstances, “bug report” may be more appropriate than “bug”.

Digits of precision:

  • Don't report more digits of precision than the measurement process reliably and reproducibly produces. The 3rd or 4th digit of precision is rarely accurate and generalizable; if you don't have confidence that it is both repeatable and generalizable to new experiments, omit it. Another way to say this is that if you are not confident that a different set of experiments would produce all the same digits, then don't report so much precision.
  • Don't report more digits of precision than needed to convey your message. If the difference between 4.13 and 4 will not make a difference in convincing readers, then don't report the extra digits. Reporting extra digits can distract readers from the larger trends and the big picture. Including an inappropriate number of digits of precision can cast suspicion on all of your results, by giving readers the impression that you are statistically naive.
  • Use a consistent number of digits of precision. If the measured data are 1.23, 45.67, and 891.23, for example, you might report them as 1.23, 45.7, and 891, or as 1.2, 46, and 890, or as 1, 50, and 900. (An exception is when data are known to sum to a particular value; I would report 93% and 7% rather than either 93% and 7.4% or 90% and 7%. Often it's appropriate to report percentages as whole numbers rather than using the same precision.)
  • If you do any computations such as ratios, your computations should internally use the full precision of your actual measurements, even though your paper reports only a limited number of digits of precision.
  • If a measurement is exact, such as a count of items, then it can be acceptable to give the entire number even if it has many digits; by contrast, timings and other inexact measurements should always be reported with a limited number of digits of precision.

Do not confuse relative and absolute measurements. For instance, suppose your medicine cures 30% of patients, and the placebo cures 25% of patients. You could report that your medicine's cure rate is .3, the placebo's cure rate is .25, and your medicine's cure rate is either .05 greater or 20% greater. (Other correct, but less good, ways to say the same thing are that it cures 20% more, 120% as many, or 1.2 times as many patients.) It would be inaccurate to state that your medicine cures 5% more patients or your medicine cures 120% more patients. Just as you need to correctly use “120% more” versus “120% as many”, you need to correctly use “3 times faster than” versus “3 times as fast as”. A related, also common, confusion is between “3 times faster than and 3 times as fast as”. And, “2 times fewer” makes absolutely no sense. I would avoid these terms entirely. “Half as many” is a much better substitute for “2 times fewer”.

Given the great ease of misunderstanding what a percentage means or what its denominator is, I try to avoid percentages and focus on fractions whenever possible, especially for base measurements. For comparisons between techniques, percentages can be acceptable. Avoid presenting two different measurements that are both percentages but have different denominators.

Your paper probably includes tables, bibliographies, or other content that is generated from external data. Your paper may also be written in a text formatting language such as LaTeX. In each of these cases, it is necessary to run some external command to create some of the content or to create the final PDF.

All of the steps to create your final paper should be clearly documented — say, in comments or in a notes file that you maintain with the paper. Preferably, they should be automated so that you only have to run one command that collects all the data, creates the tables, and generates the final PDF.

If you document and automate these steps, then you can easily regenerate the paper when needed. This is useful if you re-run experiments or analysis, or if you need to defend your results against a criticism by other researchers. If you leave some steps manual, then you or your colleagues are highly likely to make a mistake (leading to a scientific error) or to be unable to reproduce your results later.

One good way to automate these tasks is by writing a program or creating a script for a build system such as Ant, Gradle, Make, Maven, etc.

A related work section should not only explain what research others have done, but in each case should compare and contrast that to your work and also to other related work. After reading your related work section, a reader should understand the key idea and contribution of each significant piece of related work, how they fit together (what are the common themes or approaches in the research community?), and how your work differs. Don't write a related work section that is just a list of other papers, with a sentence about each one that was lifted from its abstract, and without any critical analysis nor deep comparison to other work.

Unless your approach is a small variation on another technique, it is usually best to defer the related work to the end of the paper. When it comes first, it gives readers the impression that your work is rather derivative. (If this is true, it is your responsibility to convey that clearly; if it is not true, then it's misleading to intimate it.) You need to ensure that readers understand your technique in its entirety, and also understand its relationship to other work; different orders can work in different circumstances.

Just as you should generally explain your technique first, and later show relationships with other work, it is also usually more effective to defer a detailed discussion of limitations to a later section rather than the main description of your technique. You should be straightforward and honest about the limitations, of course (do mention them early on, even if you don't detail them then), but don't destroy the coherence of your narrative or sour the reader on your technique.

Get feedback ! Finish your paper well in advance, so that you can improve the writing. Even re-reading your own text after being away from it can show you things that you didn't notice. An outside reader can tell you even more.

When readers misunderstand the paper, that is always at least partly the author's fault! Even if you think the readers have missed the point, you will learn how your work can be misinterpreted, and eliminating those ambiguities will improve the paper.

Be considerate to your reviewers, who are spending their time to help you. Here are several ways to do that.

As with submission to conferences, don't waste anyone's time if there are major flaws. Only ask someone to read (a part of) your paper when you think you will learn something new, because you are not aware of serious problems. If only parts are ready, it is best to indicate this in the paper itself (e.g., a TODO comment that the reader will see or a hand-written annotation on a hardcopy) rather than verbally or in email that can get forgotten or separated from the paper.

Sometimes you want to tell a colleague who is giving you feedback that some sections of your draft are not ready to be read, or to focus on particular aspects of the document. You should write such directions in the paper, not just in email or verbally. You will then update them as you update the paper, and all relevant information is collected together. By contrast, it's asking for trouble to make your colleague keep track of information that is in multiple places.

It is most effective to get feedback sequentially rather than in parallel. Rather than asking 3 people to read the same version of your paper, ask one person to read the paper, then make corrections before asking the next person to read it, and so on. This prevents you from getting the same comments repeatedly — subsequent readers can give you new feedback rather than repeating what you already knew, and you'll get feedback on something that is closer to the final version. If you ask multiple reviewers at once, you are de-valuing their time — you are indicating that you don't mind if they waste their time saying something you already know. You might ask multiple reviewers if you are not confident of their judgment or if you are very confident the paper already is in good shape, in which case there are unlikely to be major issues that every reviewer stumbles over.

It usually best not to email the document, but to provide a location from which reviewers can obtain the latest version of the paper, such as a version control repository or a URL you will update. That way, you won't clutter inboxes with many revisions, and readers can always get the most recent copy.

Be generous with your time when colleagues need comments on their papers: you will help them, you will learn what to emulate or avoid, and they will be more willing to review your writing.

Some of your best feedback will be from yourself, especially as you get more thoughtful and introspective about your writing. To take advantage of this, start writing early. One good way to do this is to write a periodic progress report that describes your successes and failures. The progress report will give you practice writing about your work, oftentimes trying out new explanations.

Whereas you should start writing as early as possible, you don't need to put that writing in the form of a technical paper right away. In fact, it's usually best to outline the technical paper, and get feedback on that, before you start to fill in the sections with text. (You might think that you can copy existing text into the paper, but it usually works out better to write the information anew. With your knowledge of the overall structure, goals, and audience, you will be able to do a much better job that fits with the paper's narrative.) When outlining, I like to start with one sentence about the paper; then write one sentence for each section of the paper; then write one sentence for each subsection; then write one sentence for each paragraph (think of this as the topic sentence); and at that point, it's remarkably easy just to flesh out the paragraphs.

You should not submit your paper too early, when it does not reflect well on you and a submission would waste the community's reviewing resources. You should not submit your paper too late, because then the community is deprived of your scientific insights. In general, you should err on the side of submitting too late rather than too early.

A rule of thumb is to submit only if you are proud for the world to associate your name with the work, in its current form . If you know of significant criticisms that reviewers might raise, then don't submit the paper.

Submitting your paper prematurely has many negative consequences.

  • You will waste the time of hard-working reviewers, who will give you feedback that you could have obtained in other ways.
  • You will get a reputation for shoddy work.
  • You will make the paper less likely to be accepted in the future. Oftentimes the same reviewers may serve two different venues. Reviewing a paper again puts a reviewer in a negative state of mind. I have frequently heard reviewers say, “I read an earlier version of this paper, it was a bad paper, and this version is similar.” (This is unethical because reviewers are not supposed to talk about papers they have reviewed, but nonetheless it is very common.) Now the paper will likely be rejected again, and the whole committee gets a bad impression of you. A reviewer who has read a previous version of the paper may read the resubmission less carefully or make assumptions based on a previous version. To sum up: it's harder to get a given paper accepted on its second submission, than it would have been to get the identical paper accepted on its first submission.

Here are some bad reasons to submit a paper.

It's true that the feedback from reviewers is extraordinarily valuable to you and will help you improve the paper. However, you should get feedback from other scientists (your friends and colleagues) before submitting for publication.

Those are true facts, and some people do “salami-slice” their research into as many papers as possible — such papers are called a “least publishable unit”. However, doing so leads to less impact than publishing fewer papers, each one with more content. If a paper contains few contributions, it is less likely to make a big impression, because it is less exciting. In addition, readers won't enjoy reading many pages to learn just a few facts.

Note: This point refers to taking a single research idea or theme and splitting it into multiple publications. When there are multiple distinct research contributions, it can be appropriate to describe them in different papers.

The reviewing process can be frustrating, because it contains a great deal of randomness: the same paper would be rejected by some reviewers and accepted by others. However, all great papers are accepted and all bad papers are rejected. For mediocre papers, luck plays a role. Your goal should not be to write great papers, not mediocre ones. Find a way to improve your paper. Recognize the great value of reviews: they provide a valuable perspective on your work and how to improve it, even if you feel that the reviewer should have done a better job.

If you aren't excited about the paper, it is unlikely that other people will be. Furthermore, the period after submitting the paper is not a time to take a break, but an opportunity to further improve it.

After you submit a paper, don't stop working on it! You can always improve the research. For instance, you might expand the experiments, improve the implementation, or make other changes. Even if your paper is accepted, you want the accepted version to be as impressive as possible. And if the paper is rejected, you need to have a better paper to submit to the next venue.

(This section is most relevant to fields like computer science where conferences are the premier publication venue. Responding to journal reviews is different.)

Many conferences provide an author response period: the authors are shown the reviews and are given limited space (say, 500 words) to respond to the reviews, such as by clarifying misunderstandings or answering questions. The author response is sometimes called a “rebuttal”, but I don't like that term because it sets an adversarial tone.

Your paper will only be accepted if there is a champion for the paper: someone who is excited about it and will try to convince the rest of the committee to accept the paper. Your response needs to give information to your champion to overcome objections. If there isn't a champion, then the main goal of your response is to create that champion. Your response should also give information to detractors to soften their opposition.

After reading the reviews, you may be disappointed or angry. Take a break to overcome this, so that you can think clearly.

For every point in the reviews, write a brief response. Do this in email-response style, to ensure that you did not miss any points. You will want to save this for later, so it can be better to do this in the paper's version control repository, rather than in a WYSIWYG editor such as Google Docs. (This assumes you have a version control repository for the paper, which you should!) Much of this text won't go in your response, but it is essential for formulating the response.

Summarize (in 5 or so bullet points, however many make sense) the key concerns of the reviewers. Your review needs to focus on the most important and substantive critiques. The authors of the paper should agree on this structure before you start to write the actual response.

Your response to each point will be one paragraph in your response. Start the paragraph with a brief heading or title about the point. Do not assume that the reviewers remember everything that was written by every reviewer, nor that they will re-read their reviews before reading your response. A little context will help them determine what you are talking about and will make the review stand on its own. This also lets you frame the issues in your own words, which may be clearer or address a more relevant point than the reviews did.

Organize your responses thematically. Group the paragraphs into sections, and have a small heading/title for each section. If a given section has just one paragraph, then you can use the paragraph heading as the section heading. Order the sections from most to least important.

This is better than organizing your response by reviewer, first addressing the comments of reviewer 1, then reviewer 2, and so forth. Downsides of by-reviewer organization include:

  • It can encourage you not to give sufficient context.
  • It does not encourage putting related information together nor important information first.
  • You want to encourage all reviewers to read the entire response, rather than encouraging them to just look at one part.
  • When multiple reviewers raised the same issue, then no matter where you address it, it's possible for a reviewer to overlook it and think you failed to address it.
  • You don't want to make glaringly obvious which issues in a review you had to ignore (for reasons of space or other reasons).
  • You don't want to make glaringly obvious that you spent much more time and space on one reviewer than another.

In general, it's best not to mention reviewer names/numbers in your response at all. Make the response be about the science, not about the people.

In your responses, admit your errors forthrightly. Don't ignore or avoid key issues, especially ones that multiple reviewers brought up.

Finally, be civil and thankful the reviewers. They have spent considerable time and energy to give you feedback (even if it doesn't seem to you that they have!), and you should be grateful and courteous in return.

If you submit technical papers, you will experience rejection. In some cases, rejection indicates that you should move on and begin a different line of research. In most cases, the reviews offer an opportunity to improve the work, and so you should be very grateful for a rejection! It is much better for your career if a good paper appears at a later date, rather than a poor paper earlier or a sequence of weak papers.

Even small flaws or omissions in an otherwise good paper may lead to rejection. This is particularly at the elite venues with small acceptance rates, where you should aim your work. Referees are generally people of good will, but different referees at a conference may have different standards, so the luck of the draw in referees is a factor in acceptance.

The wrong lesson to learn from rejection is discouragement or a sense of personal failure. Many papers — even papers that later win awards — are rejected at least once. The feedback you receive, and the opportunity to return to your work, will invariably improve your results.

Don't be put off by a negative tone in the reviews. The referees are trying to help you, and the bast way to do that is to point out how your work can be improved. I often write a much longer review, with more suggestions for improvement, for papers that I like; if the paper is terrible, I may not be able to make as many concrete suggestions, or my high-level comments may make detailed comments moot.

If a reviewer didn't understand something, then the main fault almost always lies with your writing. If you blame a lazy or dumb reviewer, you are missing the opportunity to improve. Reviewers are not perfect, but they work hard to give you helpful suggestions, so you should give them the benefit of the doubt. Remember that just as it is hard to convey technical ideas in your paper (and if you are getting a rejection, that is evidence that you did not succeed!), it is hard to convey them in a review, and the review is written in a few hours rather than the weeks you spent on the paper (not to mention months or years of understanding the concepts). You should closely attend to both the explicit comments, and to underlying issues that may have led to those comments — it isn't always easy to capture every possible comment in a coherent manner. Think about how to improve your research and your writing, even beyond the explicit suggestions in the review — the prime responsibility for your research and writing belongs with you.

Norman Ramsey's nice Teach Technical Writing in Two Hours per Week espouses a similar approach to mine: by focusing on clarity in your writing, you will inevitably gain clarity in your thinking.

Don't bother to read both the student and instructor manuals — the student one is a subset of the instructor one. You can get much of the benefit from just one part, his excellent “principles and practices of successful writers”:

  • Correctness. Write correct English, but know that you have more latitude than your high-school English teachers may have given you.
  • Consistent names. Refer to each significant character (algorithm, concept, language) using the same word everywhere. Give a significant new character a proper name.
  • Singular. To distinguish one-to-one relationships from n-to-m relationships, refer to each item in the singular, not the plural.
  • Subjects and verbs. Put your important characters in subjects, and join each subject to a verb that expresses a significant action.
  • Information flow. In each sentence, move your reader from familiar information to new information.
  • Emphasis. For material you want to carry weight or be remembered, use the end of a sentence.
  • Coherence. In a coherent passage, choose subjects that refer to a consistent set of related concepts.
  • Parallel structure. Order your text so your reader can easily see how related concepts are different and how they are similar.
  • Abstract. In an abstract, don't enumerate a list of topics covered; instead, convey the essential information found in your paper.
  • Write in brief daily sessions. Ignore the common myth that successful writing requires large, uninterrupted blocks of time — instead, practice writing in brief, daily sessions.
  • Focus on the process, not the product. Don't worry about the size or quality of your output; instead, reward yourself for the consistency and regularity of your input.
  • Prewrite. Don't be afraid to think before you write, or even jot down notes, diagrams, and so on.
  • Use index cards. Use them to plan a draft or to organize or reorganize a large unit like a section or chapter.
  • Write a Shitty First Draft™. Value a first draft not because it's great but because it's there.
  • Don't worry about page limits. Write the paper you want, then cut it down to size.
  • Cut. Plan a revision session in which your only goal is to cut.
  • Norman Ramsey's advice , excerpted immediately above .
  • “Hints on writing an M.Eng. thesis” , by Jeremy Nimmer
  • my notes on reviewing a technical paper , which indicate how to recognize — and thus produce — quality work
  • my notes on choosing a venue for publication
  • my notes on giving a technical talk : a talk has the same goal as a paper, namely to convey technical ideas
  • my notes on making a technical poster
  • Ronald B. Standler's advice on technical writing
  • Dave Patterson's Writing Advice
  • Advice on SIGPLAN conference submissions (at bottom of page)
  • The Elements of Style , William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, is classic book on improving your writing. It focuses at a low level, on English usage.
  • Style: Toward Clarity and Grace , by Joseph M. Williams, is another general-purpose writing guide, with a somewhat higher-level focus than that of Strunk & White.
  • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century , by Steven Pinker, is an excellent guide to writing. It gives reasons (from psychology and other scientific fields) for its advice, making it more authoritative than someone's opinion.

Back to Advice compiled by Michael Ernst .

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Guide to Technical Report Writing

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research paper for technical report

Table of contents

1 Introduction

2 structure, 3 presentation, 4 planning the report, 5 writing the first draft, 6 revising the first draft, 7 diagrams, graphs, tables and mathematics, 8 the report layout, 10 references to diagrams, graphs, tables and equations, 11 originality and plagiarism, 12 finalising the report and proofreading, 13 the summary, 14 proofreading, 15 word processing / desktop publishing, 16 recommended reading.

A technical report is a formal report designed to convey technical information in a clear and easily accessible format. It is divided into sections which allow different readers to access different levels of information. This guide explains the commonly accepted format for a technical report; explains the purposes of the individual sections; and gives hints on how to go about drafting and refining a report in order to produce an accurate, professional document.

A technical report should contain the following sections;

Title page Must include the title of the report. Reports for assessment, where the word length has been specified, will often also require the summary word count and the main text word count
Summary A summary of the whole report including important features, results and conclusions
Contents Numbers and lists all section and subsection headings with page numbers
Introduction States the objectives of the report and comments on the way the topic of the report is to be treated. Leads straight into the report itself. Must not be a copy of the introduction in a lab handout.
The sections which make up the body of the report Divided into numbered and headed sections. These sections separate the different main ideas in a logical order
Conclusions A short, logical summing up of the theme(s) developed in the main text
References Details of published sources of material referred to or quoted in the text (including any lecture notes and URL addresses of any websites used.
Bibliography Other published sources of material, including websites, not referred to in the text but useful for background or further reading.
Acknowledgements List of people who helped you research or prepare the report, including your proofreaders
Appendices (if appropriate) Any further material which is essential for full understanding of your report (e.g. large scale diagrams, computer code, raw data, specifications) but not required by a casual reader

For technical reports required as part of an assessment, the following presentation guidelines are recommended;

Script The report must be printed single sided on white A4 paper. Hand written or dot-matrix printed reports are not acceptable.
Margins All four margins must be at least 2.54 cm
Page numbers Do not number the title, summary or contents pages. Number all other pages consecutively starting at 1
Binding A single staple in the top left corner or 3 staples spaced down the left hand margin. For longer reports (e.g. year 3 project report) binders may be used.

There are some excellent textbooks contain advice about the writing process and how to begin (see Section 16 ). Here is a checklist of the main stages;

  • Collect your information. Sources include laboratory handouts and lecture notes, the University Library, the reference books and journals in the Department office. Keep an accurate record of all the published references which you intend to use in your report, by noting down the following information; Journal article: author(s) title of article name of journal (italic or underlined) year of publication volume number (bold) issue number, if provided (in brackets) page numbers Book: author(s) title of book (italic or underlined) edition, if appropriate publisher year of publication N.B. the listing of recommended textbooks in section 2 contains all this information in the correct format.
  • Creative phase of planning. Write down topics and ideas from your researched material in random order. Next arrange them into logical groups. Keep note of topics that do not fit into groups in case they come in useful later. Put the groups into a logical sequence which covers the topic of your report.
  • Structuring the report. Using your logical sequence of grouped ideas, write out a rough outline of the report with headings and subheadings.

N.B. the listing of recommended textbooks in Section 16 contains all this information in the correct format.

Who is going to read the report? For coursework assignments, the readers might be fellow students and/or faculty markers. In professional contexts, the readers might be managers, clients, project team members. The answer will affect the content and technical level, and is a major consideration in the level of detail required in the introduction.

Begin writing with the main text, not the introduction. Follow your outline in terms of headings and subheadings. Let the ideas flow; do not worry at this stage about style, spelling or word processing. If you get stuck, go back to your outline plan and make more detailed preparatory notes to get the writing flowing again.

Make rough sketches of diagrams or graphs. Keep a numbered list of references as they are included in your writing and put any quoted material inside quotation marks (see Section 11 ).

Write the Conclusion next, followed by the Introduction. Do not write the Summary at this stage.

This is the stage at which your report will start to take shape as a professional, technical document. In revising what you have drafted you must bear in mind the following, important principle;

  • the essence of a successful technical report lies in how accurately and concisely it conveys the intended information to the intended readership.

During year 1, term 1 you will be learning how to write formal English for technical communication. This includes examples of the most common pitfalls in the use of English and how to avoid them. Use what you learn and the recommended books to guide you. Most importantly, when you read through what you have written, you must ask yourself these questions;

  • Does that sentence/paragraph/section say what I want and mean it to say? If not, write it in a different way.
  • Are there any words/sentences/paragraphs which could be removed without affecting the information which I am trying to convey? If so, remove them.

It is often the case that technical information is most concisely and clearly conveyed by means other than words. Imagine how you would describe an electrical circuit layout using words rather than a circuit diagram. Here are some simple guidelines;

Diagrams Keep them simple. Draw them specifically for the report. Put small diagrams after the text reference and as close as possible to it. Think about where to place large diagrams.
Graphs For detailed guidance on graph plotting, see the
Tables Is a table the best way to present your information? Consider graphs, bar charts or pie charts.
Dependent tables (small) can be placed within the text, even as part of a sentence.
Independent tables (larger) are separated from the text with table numbers and captions. Position them as close as possible to the text reference. Complicated tables should go in an appendix.
Mathematics Only use mathematics where it is the most efficient way to convey the information. Longer mathematical arguments, if they are really necessary, should go into an appendix. You will be provided with lecture handouts on the correct layout for mathematics.

The appearance of a report is no less important than its content. An attractive, clearly organised report stands a better chance of being read. Use a standard, 12pt, font, such as Times New Roman, for the main text. Use different font sizes, bold, italic and underline where appropriate but not to excess. Too many changes of type style can look very fussy.

Use heading and sub-headings to break up the text and to guide the reader. They should be based on the logical sequence which you identified at the planning stage but with enough sub-headings to break up the material into manageable chunks. The use of numbering and type size and style can clarify the structure as follows;

devices
  • In the main text you must always refer to any diagram, graph or table which you use.
  • Label diagrams and graphs as follows; Figure 1.2 Graph of energy output as a function of wave height. In this example, the second diagram in section 1 would be referred to by "...see figure 1.2..."
  • Label tables in a similar fashion; Table 3.1 Performance specifications of a range of commercially available GaAsFET devices In this example, the first table in section 3 might be referred to by "...with reference to the performance specifications provided in Table 3.1..."
  • Number equations as follows; F(dB) = 10*log 10 (F) (3.6) In this example, the sixth equation in section 3 might be referred to by "...noise figure in decibels as given by eqn (3.6)..."

Whenever you make use of other people's facts or ideas, you must indicate this in the text with a number which refers to an item in the list of references. Any phrases, sentences or paragraphs which are copied unaltered must be enclosed in quotation marks and referenced by a number. Material which is not reproduced unaltered should not be in quotation marks but must still be referenced. It is not sufficient to list the sources of information at the end of the report; you must indicate the sources of information individually within the report using the reference numbering system.

Information that is not referenced is assumed to be either common knowledge or your own work or ideas; if it is not, then it is assumed to be plagiarised i.e. you have knowingly copied someone else's words, facts or ideas without reference, passing them off as your own. This is a serious offence . If the person copied from is a fellow student, then this offence is known as collusion and is equally serious. Examination boards can, and do, impose penalties for these offences ranging from loss of marks to disqualification from the award of a degree

This warning applies equally to information obtained from the Internet. It is very easy for markers to identify words and images that have been copied directly from web sites. If you do this without acknowledging the source of your information and putting the words in quotation marks then your report will be sent to the Investigating Officer and you may be called before a disciplinary panel.

Your report should now be nearly complete with an introduction, main text in sections, conclusions, properly formatted references and bibliography and any appendices. Now you must add the page numbers, contents and title pages and write the summary.

The summary, with the title, should indicate the scope of the report and give the main results and conclusions. It must be intelligible without the rest of the report. Many people may read, and refer to, a report summary but only a few may read the full report, as often happens in a professional organisation.

  • Purpose - a short version of the report and a guide to the report.
  • Length - short, typically not more than 100-300 words
  • Content - provide information, not just a description of the report.

This refers to the checking of every aspect of a piece of written work from the content to the layout and is an absolutely necessary part of the writing process. You should acquire the habit of never sending or submitting any piece of written work, from email to course work, without at least one and preferably several processes of proofreading. In addition, it is not possible for you, as the author of a long piece of writing, to proofread accurately yourself; you are too familiar with what you have written and will not spot all the mistakes.

When you have finished your report, and before you staple it, you must check it very carefully yourself. You should then give it to someone else, e.g. one of your fellow students, to read carefully and check for any errors in content, style, structure and layout. You should record the name of this person in your acknowledgements.

Word processing and desktop publishing packages offer great scope for endless revision of a document. This includes words, word order, style and layout. Word processing and desktop publishing packages never make up for poor or inaccurate content
They allow for the incremental production of a long document in portions which are stored and combined later They can waste a lot of time by slowing down writing and distracting the writer with the mechanics of text and graphics manipulation.
They can be used to make a document look stylish and professional. Excessive use of 'cut and paste' leads to tedious repetition and sloppy writing.
They make the process of proofreading and revision extremely straightforward

Two useful tips;

  • Do not bother with style and formatting of a document until the penultimate or final draft.
  • Do not try to get graphics finalised until the text content is complete.
  • Davies J.W. Communication Skills - A Guide for Engineering and Applied Science Students (2nd ed., Prentice Hall, 2001)
  • van Emden J. Effective communication for Science and Technology (Palgrave 2001)
  • van Emden J. A Handbook of Writing for Engineers 2nd ed. (Macmillan 1998)
  • van Emden J. and Easteal J. Technical Writing and Speaking, an Introduction (McGraw-Hill 1996)
  • Pfeiffer W.S. Pocket Guide to Technical Writing (Prentice Hall 1998)
  • Eisenberg A. Effective Technical Communication (McGraw-Hill 1992)

Updated and revised by the Department of Engineering & Design, November 2022

School Office: School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex, Chichester 1 Room 002, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9QJ [email protected] T 01273 (67) 8195 School Office opening hours: School Office open Monday – Friday 09:00-15:00, phone lines open Monday-Friday 09:00-17:00 School Office location [PDF 1.74MB]

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What is a Technical Report?

What is a Technical Report?  

"A technical report is a document written by a researcher detailing the results of a project and submitted to the sponsor of that project." TRs are not peer-reviewed unless they are subsequently published in a peer-review journal.

Characteristics (TRs vary greatly): Technical reports ....

  • may contain data, design criteria, procedures, literature reviews, research history, detailed tables, illustrations/images, explanation of approaches that were unsuccessful.
  • may be published before the corresponding journal literature; may have more or different details than  its subsequent journal article.
  • may contain less  background information since the sponsor already knows it
  • classified and export controlled reports
  • may contain obscure acronyms and codes as part of identifying information

Disciplines:

  • Physical sciences, engineering, agriculture, biomedical sciences, and the social sciences. education etc.

Documents research and development conducted by:

  • government agencies (NASA, Department of Defense (DoD) and Department of Energy (DOE) are top sponsors of research
  • commercial companies
  • non-profit, non-governmental organizations
  • Educational Institutions
  • Issued  in print, microform, digital
  • Older TRs may have been digitized and are available in fulltext on the Intranet
  • Newer TRs should be born digital

Definition used with permission from Georgia Tech. Other sources: Pinelli & Barclay (1994).

  • Nation's Report Card: State Reading 2002, Report for Department of Defense Domestic Dependent Elementary and Secondary Schools. U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences The National Assessment of Educational Progress Reading 2002 The Nation’s
  • Study for fabrication, evaluation, and testing of monolayer woven type materials for space suit insulation NASA-CR-166139, ACUREX-TR-79-156. May 1979. Reproduced from the microfiche.
An infrared Mars probe for gathering evidence on extraterrestrial life
Author and Affiliation:
Davies, R. W. (Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech., Pasadena, CA, United States);  
Gumpel, M. (Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech., Pasadena, CA, United States)  
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Technical Report Examples

50 professional technical report examples (+format samples).

A technical report example is a written document made by a researcher which contains the details about a project’s results . After creating the technical report, the researcher submits it to the project’s sponsor. Such a report may contain procedures, design criteria, research history, images or illustrations, and other data relevant to the project.

Table of Contents

  • 1 Technical Report Examples
  • 2 Elements of a technical report example
  • 3 Technical Reports Format
  • 4 Language, formatting, and design tips for your technical report example
  • 5 Technical Report Samples
  • 6 Technical Report Templates
  • 7 Avoid these common mistakes when making your technical report example

Free technical report template 01

Elements of a technical report example

When you’re tasked to write a technical report example, you must take note of the technical report format because this is very important. The format of such a report makes it unique from other types of written reports because it contains technical information thus, you need to plan it well.

When writing this report, you must understand its structure so that you can achieve your objective. Make sure the document contains the following elements:

  • Title page This page must come first in any technical report sample. It contains the title of your report, the date, the details of the institution, and the supervisor. This page is also known as a cover page . Any content you place here isn’t included on your report’s word count. This page is a separate entity in terms of word count so keep this in mind.
  • Introduction Here, you highlight the main objectives of your technical report example for the reader. This helps your reader understand why you wrote the report in the first place. You can also include a comment about the report’s flow to give the reader an idea of what to expect.
  • Summary For this part of the technical report format, come up with an overview of the entire report including any results or conclusions you’ve made. It’s best to write this part after you’ve finished the rest of the content.
  • Details of the experiment Here, include each of the details about the experiment you’ve conducted starting from the materials and equipment you used then the procedure or the steps you took. If you didn’t perform any experiment, then you may omit this part from the technical report format.
  • Results and discussions If you performed any kind of experiment for the technical report, you would have to provide all of the results along with an explanation of the results you obtained. This gives the reader a better idea of the results you’ve provided.
  • Body This is the most important part of your technical report sample since it contains the “meat” of your document. Here, create subheadings to emphasize the most important points. Also, adding subheadings makes the report easier to reads your readers can use the subheadings to guide them. Also, placing your points in a bulleted or numbered list makes it easier for the readers to understand the points you’re trying to convey. To make it even better, separate the points under their individual subtopics to avoid confusion.
  • Conclusions When writing your conclusions, create a summary of all the main points of your report’s body. This serves as a wrap-up of the main content of your document. Also, use words which indicate that you’re concluding the report so the reader is psychologically prepared that the report is now coming to an end.
  • Recommendations Here, you can give your suggested solutions for any of the challenges you’ve stated in the body of the report. This is the best place to write your opinions for the readers to know about them.
  • References In this section, make a list of all the materials you used throughout your research. If you have quoted any text, list those references here to ensure that your report isn’t considered plagiarism. When writing the references, you’re acknowledging that you’ve obtained your content from certain sources.
  • Acknowledgments Make a list of everyone who helped you come up with the report. From the people who proofread your report to those who helped you with the experiments and more, mention them in this section.
  • Appendices If you used other materials like diagrams and graphs to emphasize the information in your report, include them in this section. If you didn’t use any such materials or information, you don’t have to include this section.

Technical Reports Format

Free technical report template 10

Language, formatting, and design tips for your technical report example

If you have a message that’s extremely important, you can communicate it right away even when you present it in an unorganized way. Generally though, technical report examples don’t contain any findings which you may consider “groundbreaking.” Still, you must pay attention to the contents of your report along with how you make it.

Technical Report Samples

Free technical report template 20

Here are some tips for you regarding the language, formatting, and design of technical report samples:

  • Spelling and grammar Since technical reports are more academic in nature, you must be very careful with your spelling and grammar. If your report contains these mistakes, it might decrease the credibility of the document and your own credibility too. This is why proofreading is an extremely important step for this type of report and for other academic reports you plan to make. Ask more than just one person to proofread your report to ensure that there are no spelling and grammar errors on it.
  • Style Technical reports follow a specific style. You must follow a formal style for this type of report so as not to confuse or irritate your readers. Informal writing isn’t appropriate for technical reports so you must keep this in mind. In some cases, you may inject humor in your report. Make sure that the type of humor you use isn’t inappropriate and you include it in a proper manner. For instance, it’s probably not a good idea if the subject of your report is something sensitive or taboo. In such a case, injecting humor might reflect badly on you or on the message you want to convey. Of course, there are times when this works and it’s up to you to determine whether or not to include humor as part of your document’s style. Also, try not to write the content of your document the same way you speak. One reason for this is that you may use a lot of ungrammatical or colloquial expressions when you speak which might confuse your readers. Keep in mind that your readers can’t ask you questions while they read your report, especially if you’re not around. Another reason is that when it comes to writing, you can’t have the same tone or emphasis to explain what you want to say unlike when you’re speaking. For written documents, you the reader only relies on the words on the page so you must choose these carefully.
  • Presentation Although the presentation of your document isn’t as important as the technical content, you should still place some emphasis on it. After all, no matter how well-written your document is, if it’s presented poorly, your readers won’t appreciate it. How you present your report gives the first impression to the readers so you must make sure it’s a good one.
  • Graphic material Most technical report examples contain more than just text. They typically include images, graphics, charts, and more to illustrate or explain the content more effectively. Here are some tips when it comes to graphic material: Make sure to label everything. Use captions, titles, and other kinds of text to tell the reader about the graphic material you’ve inserted. Think about whether you plan to print your report in color or grayscale. If you choose the latter, make sure that the images you use are either in grayscale too or your readers can still understand them even when printed without colors. Only include relevant graphic material. Adding too many images might make your report look cluttered so choose these elements wisely.

Technical Report Templates

Free technical report template 30

Avoid these common mistakes when making your technical report example

Apart from being very careful when writing the format of your technical report example, there are some common mistakes you must avoid too. These are:

  • Using too stock phrases or clichés Although these are very common, you may want to avoid using such phrases because they’re so over-used. When your readers keep encountering these phrases in your report, they might feel annoyed. It’s better to use direct sentences to make the information simpler and easier to comprehend.
  • Providing too much data Yes, the technical report should contain a lot of information. But you don’t have to provide data which isn’t directly relevant to the report or the project you’re reporting on. Stick to the facts and only include the important information so your readers don’t get confused.
  • Using non-technical content or material Such content may be quite annoying when it’s not related to the subject. But even if the content relates to the subject, including such material may come off as offensive to your readers.
  • Using long mathematical equations or computer program listings Although you may understand such information, it’s unlikely that other people will understand this too. Unless you think that such content is extremely essential to your report, avoid adding it.
  • Stating how challenging it was to create the report Including such statements isn’t professional. No matter how difficult a time you had, never state this in the report. Again, stick to the facts and only include information that’s relevant to the subject of your report.

Free technical report template 40

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  • Research Paper Format | APA, MLA, & Chicago Templates

Research Paper Format | APA, MLA, & Chicago Templates

Published on November 19, 2022 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on January 20, 2023.

The formatting of a research paper is different depending on which style guide you’re following. In addition to citations , APA, MLA, and Chicago provide format guidelines for things like font choices, page layout, format of headings and the format of the reference page.

Scribbr offers free Microsoft Word templates for the most common formats. Simply download and get started on your paper.

APA |  MLA | Chicago author-date | Chicago notes & bibliography

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Table of contents

Formatting an apa paper, formatting an mla paper, formatting a chicago paper, frequently asked questions about research paper formatting.

The main guidelines for formatting a paper in APA Style are as follows:

  • Use a standard font like 12 pt Times New Roman or 11 pt Arial.
  • Set 1 inch page margins.
  • Apply double line spacing.
  • If submitting for publication, insert a APA running head on every page.
  • Indent every new paragraph ½ inch.

Watch the video below for a quick guide to setting up the format in Google Docs.

The image below shows how to format an APA Style title page for a student paper.

APA title page - student version (7th edition)

Running head

If you are submitting a paper for publication, APA requires you to include a running head on each page. The image below shows you how this should be formatted.

APA running head (7th edition)

For student papers, no running head is required unless you have been instructed to include one.

APA provides guidelines for formatting up to five levels of heading within your paper. Level 1 headings are the most general, level 5 the most specific.

APA headings (7th edition)

Reference page

APA Style citation requires (author-date) APA in-text citations throughout the text and an APA Style reference page at the end. The image below shows how the reference page should be formatted.

APA reference page (7th edition)

Note that the format of reference entries is different depending on the source type. You can easily create your citations and reference list using the free APA Citation Generator.

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The main guidelines for writing an MLA style paper are as follows:

  • Use an easily readable font like 12 pt Times New Roman.
  • Use title case capitalization for headings .

Check out the video below to see how to set up the format in Google Docs.

On the first page of an MLA paper, a heading appears above your title, featuring some key information:

  • Your full name
  • Your instructor’s or supervisor’s name
  • The course name or number
  • The due date of the assignment

MLA heading

Page header

A header appears at the top of each page in your paper, including your surname and the page number.

MLA page header

Works Cited page

MLA in-text citations appear wherever you refer to a source in your text. The MLA Works Cited page appears at the end of your text, listing all the sources used. It is formatted as shown below.

The format of the MLA Works Cited page

You can easily create your MLA citations and save your Works Cited list with the free MLA Citation Generator.

Generate MLA citations for free

The main guidelines for writing a paper in Chicago style (also known as Turabian style) are:

  • Use a standard font like 12 pt Times New Roman.
  • Use 1 inch margins or larger.
  • Place page numbers in the top right or bottom center.

Format of a Chicago Style paper

Chicago doesn’t require a title page , but if you want to include one, Turabian (based on Chicago) presents some guidelines. Lay out the title page as shown below.

Example of a Chicago Style title page

Bibliography or reference list

Chicago offers two citation styles : author-date citations plus a reference list, or footnote citations plus a bibliography. Choose one style or the other and use it consistently.

The reference list or bibliography appears at the end of the paper. Both styles present this page similarly in terms of formatting, as shown below.

Chicago bibliography

To format a paper in APA Style , follow these guidelines:

  • Use a standard font like 12 pt Times New Roman or 11 pt Arial
  • Set 1 inch page margins
  • Apply double line spacing
  • Include a title page
  • If submitting for publication, insert a running head on every page
  • Indent every new paragraph ½ inch
  • Apply APA heading styles
  • Cite your sources with APA in-text citations
  • List all sources cited on a reference page at the end

The main guidelines for formatting a paper in MLA style are as follows:

  • Use an easily readable font like 12 pt Times New Roman
  • Include a four-line MLA heading on the first page
  • Center the paper’s title
  • Use title case capitalization for headings
  • Cite your sources with MLA in-text citations
  • List all sources cited on a Works Cited page at the end

The main guidelines for formatting a paper in Chicago style are to:

  • Use a standard font like 12 pt Times New Roman
  • Use 1 inch margins or larger
  • Place page numbers in the top right or bottom center
  • Cite your sources with author-date citations or Chicago footnotes
  • Include a bibliography or reference list

To automatically generate accurate Chicago references, you can use Scribbr’s free Chicago reference generator .

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Caulfield, J. (2023, January 20). Research Paper Format | APA, MLA, & Chicago Templates. Scribbr. Retrieved September 16, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/research-paper/research-paper-format/

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APA 7th Edition Citation Examples

  • Volume and Issue Numbers
  • Page Numbers
  • Undated Sources
  • Citing a Source Within a Source
  • In-Text Citations
  • Academic Journals
  • Encyclopedia Articles
  • Book, Film, and Product Reviews
  • Online Classroom Materials
  • Conference Papers

Format for technical and research reports

  • Court Decisions
  • Treaties and Other International Agreements
  • Federal Regulations: I. The Code of Federal Regulations
  • Federal Regulations: II. The Federal Register
  • Executive Orders
  • Charter of the United Nations
  • Federal Statutes
  • Dissertations and Theses
  • Interviews, E-mail Messages + Other Personal Communications
  • Social Media
  • Business Sources
  • PowerPoints
  • AI: ChatGPT, etc.

Author last name, first initial. (Date).  Title of report  (Publication No.). Publisher. DOI or URL

  • Author:  List the last name, followed by the first initial (and second initial). See  Authors  for more information.
  • Date:  List the date between parentheses, followed by a period
  • Title of report:  In italics. Capitalize the first word of the title, subtitle, and proper nouns.
  • Publication number: Omit if unavailable for the source that you're citing
  • Publisher:  List the report's publisher. If the publisher is the same as the author, do not list the name a second time.
  • DOI or URL:  List DOI or URL if available

See specific examples below.

U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2010). Information security: Concerted effort needed to consolidate and secure Internet connections at federal agencies (Publication No. GAO-10-237). http://www.gao.gov/assets/310/301876.pdf

U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2010). Information security: Concerted effort needed to consolidate and secure Internet connections at federal agencies (Publication No. GAO-10-237).

See  Publication Manual , 10.4.

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Technical Reports & Standards Collection Guide

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  • Technical Reports Collections
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  • Jennifer Harbster, Head, Science Section, Researcher Engagement & General Collections Division
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  • Ashley Fielder,  Librarian for Medicine and Life Science. Science Section, Researcher Engagement & General Collections
  • Created:  September 22, 2023

Last Updated: May 7, 2024

Science & Technical Reports : Ask a Librarian

Have a question? Need assistance? Use our online form to ask a librarian for help.

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Get connected to the Library’s large and diverse collections related to science, technology, and business through our Inside Adams Blog. This blog also features upcoming events and collection displays, classes and orientations, new research guides, and more.

The Library of Congress is completing a project to update and modernize Library reading room websites. As a part of the process, “The Technical Reports and Standards Collection” is in the process of being updated and migrated to this new platform. The process has not yet been completed and the guide remains subject to change.

Researchers with questions about the collection are encouraged to contact a science or business librarian using the Ask-a-Librarian: Science and Technical Reports or Ask a Librarian: Business online form, by phone, at (202) 707-5639, or in person, at the reference desk, in the Science and Business Reading Room, on the fifth floor of the Library's John Adams Building.

Technical Reports

research paper for technical report

Technical reports are designed to quickly alert researchers to recent findings and developments in scientific and technical research. These reports are issued for a variety of purposes:

  • to communicate results or describe progress of a research project
  • to convey background information on an emerging or critical research topic
  • to provide lists of instructions or procedures for current practices
  • to determine the feasibility of a technology and recommend if research should be continued (and how to evaluate any further progress made)
  • to detail technical specifications (materials, functions, features, operation, market potential, etc.)

Technical reports first appeared in the early part of the 20th century. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) published a series of professional papers beginning in 1902, and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) issued its first report in 1915. But, the format gained importance during World War II, emerged in the postwar era, and remains, to this day, a major tool for reporting progress in science and technology, as well as in education, business, and social sciences research. The names given to series of these publications vary, but are often such generic terms as "technical reports," "working papers," "research memoranda," "internal notes," "occasional papers," "discussion papers" or "gray (or grey) literature." In the physical and natural sciences, "technical report" seems to be the preferred designation. For reports dealing with business, education, and the social sciences, on the other hand, the terms "working paper," "occasional paper," and "memorandum" are often the designations of choice. Other, more specific types of technical reports include "preprints" and "reprints." Preprints generally are versions of papers issued by researchers before their final papers are published by commercial publishers. Preprints allow researchers to communicate their findings quickly, but usually have not been peer reviewed. Reprints are typically released to heighten awareness of the research being conducted in a particular field or at a single institution. The term, "technical report" encompasses all of these designations.

Since many of these publications are intended to provide just a temporary snapshot of current research in a particular field or topic, they may contain the some of following distinctions:

  • Rapid communication of new research results
  • Dissemination to a targeted audience.
  • Detailed methodologies, in order to facilitate review of research results by others
  • No peer review, though there is often another selection process for publication (grant, contract, or institutional affiliation)
  • Not published by typical commercial publishers (instead reports are issued or sponsored by government agencies, professional associations, societies, councils, foundations, laboratories, universities, etc.)
  • Corporate authorship, where present, is typically emphasized

Unfortunately, uncertain availability, limited print runs, and decentralized distribution patterns with little bibliographic information are also often characteristics of this literature.

The Federal Government issues many different types of technical reports. An overview of some of these can be found in a May 2001 GAO report, " Information Management: Dissemination of Technical Reports ." Government issued or sponsored reports contain an additional characteristic - they may be subject to distribution restrictions linked to their classification status. Although references to classified reports may be found in technical reports literature, the security status or limited distribution of reports may make them unavailable to the general public and to the Library as well, as the Library holds only titles in the public domain. Those interested in locating such materials can consult the U.S. Department of Justice's Freedom of Information Act  site for guidance in obtaining these reports.

To enable them to be identified and located, technical reports are assigned report codes by agencies or organizations involved in their production or distribution. These codes may be referred to as "accession numbers," "agency report series numbers," "contract numbers," "grant numbers" or by other names, and include dates and individual report numbers. Typically, reports are assigned multiple codes and these codes help to identify the sponsoring agency, the organization performing the research or the organization disseminating the report.  Most technical reports held by the Library of Congress are not cataloged, and, for these reports, one or more report codes is required for Library staff to check the collections for a report or to locate and retrieve it. For more information about the current Standard Technical Report Number format (STRN) see ANSI/NISO Z39.23- 1997 (S2015) Standard Technical Reports Number Format and Creation . 

Standards are specifications which define products, methods, processes or practices, and are known to have existed as early as 7000 B.C., when cylindrical stones were used as units of weight in Egypt. According to  Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-119 , as revised in 2016, the term "standard" or "technical standard" refers to:

  • common and repeated use of rules, conditions, guidelines or characteristics for products or related processes and production methods, and related management systems practices;
  • the definition of terms; classification of components; delineation of procedures; specification of dimensions, materials, performance, designs, or operations; measurement of quality and quantity in describing materials, processes, products, systems, services, or practices; test methods and sampling procedures; or descriptions of fit and measurements of size or strength; and
  • terminology, symbols, packaging, marking or labeling requirements as they apply to a product, process, or production method.

Technical standards are not "professional standards of personal conduct; or institutional codes of ethics." (p. 15).

Standards are typically generated by governments or by professional associations and organizations interested in or affected by the subject matter of particular standards. For example, U.S. government standards mandated by the  Fair Packaging & Labeling Act (FPLA)  have standardized the labeling required for packaging in which consumer commodities is sold. Standards set the basis for determining consistent and acceptable minimum levels of reliability and safety, and are adhered to either voluntarily or as mandated by law. For a more complete overview, see the NIST report  " The ABC's of Standards Activities " by Maureen A. Breitenberg (2009).

The Library of Congress standards collection includes military and other federal standards, industry standards, and a few older international standards from Russia, China, and South Africa. Material from the collection is available in various formats, including digital, print, and microform materials. The majority of the Library's standards collection held in the Science Section's Technical Reports and Standards Collection. The collection remains largely uncatalogued, and as a result, most items from this collection are not discoverable in the Library's online catalog. Inquires on Library holdings can be sent to the Science Section using the Science and Technical Reports Ask-a-Librarian form . Some standards, however, are housed in the Library's general collections and discoverable by searching the  online catalog -- the ASTM standards are one example. Other standards are in custody of appropriate specialized research centers, such as the Law Library , which maintains  OSHA standards and some building codes.

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Part of the  Science & Business Reading Room  at the Library of Congress, the Science Section is the starting point for conducting research at the Library of Congress in the subject areas of science, medicine and engineering. Here, reference specialists in specific subject areas of science and engineering  assist patrons in formulating search strategies and gaining access to the information and materials contained in the Library's rich collections of science, medicine, and engineering materials.

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Technical reports, recognizing technical reports, recommendations for finding technical reports, databases with technical reports, other tools for finding technical reports.

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Technical reports describe the process, progress, or results of technical or scientific research and usually include in-depth experimental details, data, and results. Technical reports are usually produced to report on a specific research need and can serve as a report of accountability to the organization funding the research. They provide access to the information before it is published elsewhere. Technical Reports are usually not peer reviewed.  They need to be evaluated on how the problem, research method, and results are described.  

A technical report citation will include a report number and will probably not have journal name. 

Technical reports can be divided into two general categories:

  • Non-Governmental Reports- these are published by companies and engineering societies, such as Lockheed-Martin, AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautical and Astronautics), IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), or SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers).
  • Governmental Reports- the research conducted in these reports has been sponsored by the United States or an international government body as well as state and local governments.

an infographic with the phrase technical reports in the center, with arm connecting it to types of reports, namely background reports, research report

Some technical reports are cataloged as books, which you can search for in the catalog, while others may be located in databases, or free online. The boxes below list databases and online resources you can use to locate a report. 

If you’re not sure where to start, try to learn more about the report by confirming the full title or learning more about the publication information. 

Confirm the title and locate the report number in NTRL. 

Search Google Scholar, the HathiTrust, or WorldCat. This can verify the accuracy of the citation and determine if the technical report was also published in a journal or conference proceeding or under a different report number. 

Having trouble finding a report through Penn State? If we don’t have access to the report, you can submit an interlibrary loan request and we will get it for you from another library. If you have any questions, you can always contact a librarian! 

  • National Technical Reports Library (NTRL) NTRL is the preeminent resource for accessing the latest US government sponsored research, and worldwide scientific, technical, and engineering information. Search by title to determine report number.
  • Engineering Village Engineering Village is the most comprehensive interdisciplinary engineering database in the world with over 5,000 engineering journals and conference materials dating from 1884. Has citations to many ASME, ASCE, SAE, and other professional organizations' technical papers. Search by author, title, or report number.
  • IEEE Xplore Provides access to articles, papers, reports, and standards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
  • ASABE Technical Library Provides access to all of the recent technical documents published by the American Society of Agricultural Engineers.
  • International Nuclear Information System (INIS) Database Provides access to nuclear science and technology technical reports.
  • NASA Technical Reports Server Contains the searchable NACA Technical Reports collection, NASA Technical Reports collection and NIX collection of images, movies, and videos. Includes the full text and bibliographic records of selected unclassified, publicly available NASA-sponsored technical reports. Coverage: NACA reports 1915-1958, NASA reports since 1958.
  • OSTI Technical Reports Full-text of Department of Energy (DOE) funded science, technology, and engineering technical reports. OSTI has replaced SciTech Connect as the primary search tool for Department of Energy (DOE) funded science, technology, and engineering research results. It provides access to all the information previously available in SciTech Connect, DOE Information Bridge, and Energy Citations Database.
  • ERIC (ProQuest) Provides access to technical reports and other education-related materials. ERIC is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences (IES).
  • Transportation Research International Documentation (TRID) TRID is a newly integrated database that combines the records from TRB's Transportation Research Information Services (TRIS) Database and the OECD's Joint Transport Research Centre's International Transport Research Documentation (ITRD) Database. TRID provides access to over 900,000 records of transportation research worldwide.
  • TRAIL Technical Reports Archive & Image Library Provide access to federal technical reports issued prior to 1975.
  • Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) The largest central resource for Department of Defense and government-funded scientific, technical, engineering, and business related information.
  • Correlation Index of Technical Reports (AD-PB Reports) Publication Date: 1958
  • Criss-cross directory of NASA "N" numbers and DOD "AD" numbers, 1962-1986

Print indexes to technical reports :

  • Government Reports Announcements & Index (1971-1996)
  • Government Reports Announcements (1946-1975)
  • U.S. Government Research & Development Reports (1965-1971)
  • U.S. Government Research Reports (1954-1964)
  • Bibliography of Technical Reports (1949-1954)
  • Bibliography of Scientific and Industrial Reports (1946-1949)
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  • URL: https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/techreports

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

Title: palm 2 technical report.

Abstract: We introduce PaLM 2, a new state-of-the-art language model that has better multilingual and reasoning capabilities and is more compute-efficient than its predecessor PaLM. PaLM 2 is a Transformer-based model trained using a mixture of objectives. Through extensive evaluations on English and multilingual language, and reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that PaLM 2 has significantly improved quality on downstream tasks across different model sizes, while simultaneously exhibiting faster and more efficient inference compared to PaLM. This improved efficiency enables broader deployment while also allowing the model to respond faster, for a more natural pace of interaction. PaLM 2 demonstrates robust reasoning capabilities exemplified by large improvements over PaLM on BIG-Bench and other reasoning tasks. PaLM 2 exhibits stable performance on a suite of responsible AI evaluations, and enables inference-time control over toxicity without additional overhead or impact on other capabilities. Overall, PaLM 2 achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse set of tasks and capabilities. When discussing the PaLM 2 family, it is important to distinguish between pre-trained models (of various sizes), fine-tuned variants of these models, and the user-facing products that use these models. In particular, user-facing products typically include additional pre- and post-processing steps. Additionally, the underlying models may evolve over time. Therefore, one should not expect the performance of user-facing products to exactly match the results reported in this report.
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: [cs.CL]
  (or [cs.CL] for this version)
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Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

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Garage door is blown off of test structure following explosion as a result of thermal runaway test.

Journal Article Investigates Explosion Hazards from Lithium-Ion Battery Thermal Runaway Gas

The new peer-reviewed journal article, Experimental Investigation of Explosion Hazard from Lithium-Ion Battery Thermal Runaway has been published in FUEL . The paper was authored by Nate Sauer and Adam Barowy from the Fire Safety Research Institute (FSRI), part of UL Research Institutes, as well as Benjamin Gaudet from UL Solutions . As part FSRI’s Impact of Batteries on Fire Dynamics research project, the paper investigates the explosion hazards of lithium-ion battery thermal runaway gas.

Investigating the Explosion Hazards from Lithium-Ion Battery Thermal Runaway Effluent Gas 

As adoption of lithium-ion battery technology increases worldwide, safety hazards from fire and explosions present a real concern to the fire service. To better understand the hazards,  21 experiments were conducted within a full-scale garage structure designed based on demographic data and modern North American construction. The experiments included  two flammable gas mixtures derived from commercial testing of nickel cobalt aluminum oxide and lithium iron phosphate cathode cells with the UL 9540A methodology including gas chromatography to determine gas composition. Experiments were designed to simulate:

  • prompt-ignition of flammable off-gas emanating from an energy storage system (ESS) lithium-ion battery experiencing propagating thermal runaway; and
  • delayed-ignition deflagration occurring after ESS lithium-ion battery off-gas accumulates and mixes within the garage volume

During tests, pressure rise within the enclosed garage was measured using high-speed piezoelectric pressure transducers. Overpressure data was compared to known ranges for structural damage and bodily injury thresholds while time-resolved overpressure was compared to vented explosion models. Correlations were developed between gas volume and measured impulse and overpressure.

“As we see more incidents related to explosions of lithium-ion batteries, there is a clear need for concrete data to characterize the associated hazards. This data can facilitate conversations about how to mitigate the risks associated with thermal runaway.” — Nate Sauer , post-doctoral researcher, FSRI

The Impact of Explosions Resulting from Lithium-Ion Battery Thermal Runaway Gas

Data shows that when lithium-ion batteries fail and go into thermal runaway, the accumulation of thermal runaway gas poses an explosion hazard. This study finds that battery sizes such as those found in electric lawn mowers, electric vehicles, and e-mobility devices may produce enough gas during thermal runaway to damage a residential structure and risk injury to first responders or occupants. Report findings summarize the relationship between battery size and potential explosion severity. The data   is freely available to the public through an online repository .

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Research into energy sources is a critical area of study. For nearly 90 years, FUEL has been the leading source of research in fuel science. The research scope is broad and includes many topics of increasing interest such as environmental aspects and pollution.

Experiments Investigating Lithium-Ion Battery Explosion Hazards

Experiments Investigate Lithium-Ion Battery Explosion Hazards

Read about the experiments investigating explosion hazards from lithium-ion battery thermal runaways in residential garages.

Near Miss Incident Involving Energy Storage System

Near Miss Incident Involving Energy Storage System

Technical Report

Read FSRI’s report investigating this near miss incident in Surprise, AZ.

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  • Title: Book Review Article
  • Published in: The Australian Journal of Anthropology ; 11, 1 ; 59-77
  • Publisher: Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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  • Publication date: 2000-04-01
  • Size: 19 pages
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1835-9310.2000.tb00263.x
  • Type of media: Article (Journal)
  • Type of material: Electronic Resource
  • Language: English
  • Source: Wiley

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COMMENTS

  1. PDF A guide to technical report writing

    6. Conclusion. The report is checked, its appearance is pleasing, it is easy to handle, 'interesting' and 'readable', to quote the criteria suggested at the beginning of this Guide. If the technical content is as good as the organisation, writing, illustration and finishing, then the report should delight the reader.

  2. PDF A guide to technical report writing

    Reports are often written for multiple readers, for example, technical and financial managers. Writing two separate reports would be time-consuming and risk offending people who are not party to all of the information. One solution to this problem is strategic use of appendices (see page 5). A guide to technical report writing - Objectives 04 2.

  3. Technical Papers

    Download only what you need from SAE's Technical Paper Database. Topics include Advanced Hybrid & Electric Vehicle Powertrains, Accident Reconstruction Technology, Occupant Protection & Crashworthiness Technology, and more. SAE Technical Papers from 1906 to present as well as correlating records (including abstracts) Subscription Option.

  4. Technical Reports

    The NASA STI Repository (also known as the NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)) provides access to NASA metadata records, full-text online documents, images, and videos. The types of information included are conference papers, journal articles, meeting papers, patents, research reports, images, movies, and technical videos - scientific and ...

  5. Technical Report: What is it & How to Write it? (Steps & Structure

    Writing the introduction of a technical report is a crucial step in effectively conveying the purpose and scope of your work to the reader. The introduction sets the stage for the rest of the document, providing context, background information, and an overview of the report's objectives. 1. Begin with a Hook.

  6. PDF An Effective Technical Writing Guide for Engineers

    Introduction. Technical writing is a critical skill in the field of engineering, playing a pivotal role in effective. communication and knowledge dissemination. As engineers, the ability to convey complex ideas, procedures, and project details clearly and concisely is paramount. The Introduction section of the.

  7. Tips for Writing Technical Papers

    Many papers have a submitted (and later published) conference version, along with a "full paper" technical report on the web. It's important to manage versions carefully, both in content and proliferation. My recommendation is, whenever possible, for the full paper to consist of simply the conference version plus appendices.

  8. Basics of scientific and technical writing

    Introduction to scientific/technical writing. Scientific/technical writing is an essential part of research. The outcome of a research activity should be shared with others in the form of scientific paper publications; some ideas require a patent to reserve the implementation rights; and almost any research activity requires a funding source ...

  9. How to write a technical paper or a research paper

    Determine your goal (also known as your thesis), and focus the paper around that goal. As a general rule, your paper needs to convince the audience of three key points. If any of these is missing or unclear, the paper will not be compelling. The problem is important. The problem has a significant impact and consequences.

  10. Writing a Research Report

    Scientific and technical research reports generally follow a conventional format that includes a title, an abstract, a reference (or Literature Cited) section and the components of the IMRAD structure: ... accurately reflects the paper's organization, emphasis, and content on a very small scale . Introduction. focuses on the overall issue ...

  11. Reports, Proposals, and Technical Papers

    Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use. Media File: Reports, Proposals, and Technical Papers. This resource is enhanced by a PowerPoint file. If you have a Microsoft Account, you can view this file with PowerPoint Online.

  12. Guide to Technical Report Writing

    Guide to Technical Report Writing. Table of contents. 1 Introduction. 2 Structure. 3 Presentation. ... List of people who helped you research or prepare the report, including your proofreaders: Appendices (if appropriate) ... The report must be printed single sided on white A4 paper. Hand written or dot-matrix printed reports are not acceptable.

  13. Technical report

    A technical report (also scientific report) is a document that describes the process, progress, or results of technical or scientific research or the state of a technical or scientific research problem. [1] [2] It might also include recommendations and conclusions of the research.Unlike other scientific literature, such as scientific journals and the proceedings of some academic conferences ...

  14. Research Guides: Technical Reports: What is a Technical report?

    Definition. Examples. What is a Technical Report? "A technical report is a document written by a researcher detailing the results of a project and submitted to the sponsor of that project." TRs are not peer-reviewed unless they are subsequently published in a peer-review journal. Characteristics (TRs vary greatly): Technical reports ....

  15. How to Write a Research Paper

    Choose a research paper topic. Conduct preliminary research. Develop a thesis statement. Create a research paper outline. Write a first draft of the research paper. Write the introduction. Write a compelling body of text. Write the conclusion. The second draft.

  16. (PDF) Guide to technical report writing

    See Full PDFDownload PDF. Guide to technical report writing 1. Introduction A technical report is a formal report designed to convey technical information in a clear and easily accessible format. It is divided into sections which allow different readers to access different levels of information. This guide explains the commonly accepted format ...

  17. 50 Professional Technical Report Examples (+Format Samples)

    A technical report example is a written document made by a researcher which contains the details about a project's results. After creating the technical report, the researcher submits it to the project's sponsor. Such a report may contain procedures, design criteria, research history, images or illustrations, and other data relevant to the ...

  18. Research Paper Format

    The main guidelines for formatting a paper in APA Style are as follows: Use a standard font like 12 pt Times New Roman or 11 pt Arial. Set 1 inch page margins. Apply double line spacing. If submitting for publication, insert a APA running head on every page. Indent every new paragraph ½ inch.

  19. Technical + Research Reports

    Title of report (Publication No.). Publisher. DOI or URL. Elements: Author: List the last name, followed by the first initial (and second initial). See Authors for more information. Date: List the date between parentheses, followed by a period; Title of report: In italics. Capitalize the first word of the title, subtitle, and proper nouns.

  20. Technical Reports & Standards Collection Guide

    The names given to series of these publications vary, but are often such generic terms as "technical reports," "working papers," "research memoranda," "internal notes," "occasional papers," "discussion papers" or "gray (or grey) literature." In the physical and natural sciences, "technical report" seems to be the preferred designation.

  21. Finding Technical Reports

    Technical reports describe the process, progress, or results of technical or scientific research and usually include in-depth experimental details, data, and results. ... and conference materials dating from 1884. Has citations to many ASME, ASCE, SAE, and other professional organizations' technical papers. Search by author, title, or report ...

  22. [2303.08774] GPT-4 Technical Report

    We report the development of GPT-4, a large-scale, multimodal model which can accept image and text inputs and produce text outputs. While less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, GPT-4 exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks, including passing a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers. GPT-4 is a Transformer ...

  23. [2305.10403] PaLM 2 Technical Report

    PaLM 2 Technical Report. We introduce PaLM 2, a new state-of-the-art language model that has better multilingual and reasoning capabilities and is more compute-efficient than its predecessor PaLM. PaLM 2 is a Transformer-based model trained using a mixture of objectives. Through extensive evaluations on English and multilingual language, and ...

  24. Read FSRI's Journal Article on Lithium-Ion Battery Explosion Hazards

    The new peer-reviewed journal article, Experimental Investigation of Explosion Hazard from Lithium-Ion Battery Thermal Runaway has been published in FUEL.The paper was authored by Nate Sauer and Adam Barowy from the Fire Safety Research Institute (FSRI), part of UL Research Institutes, as well as Benjamin Gaudet from UL Solutions.As part FSRI's Impact of Batteries on Fire Dynamics research ...

  25. Learning to Reason with LLMs

    Let's break this down step by step based on the example: 1. Example given: • Input: oyfjdnisdr rtqwainr acxz mynzbhhx • Output: Think step by step By examining the words: • The pattern involves selecting specific letters or transforming them. 2. Now, let's decode the new phrase: • Input: oyekaijzdf aaptcg suaokybhai ouow aqht mynznvaatzacdfoulxxz

  26. Book Review Article

    The TIB Portal allows you to search the library's own holdings and other data sources simultaneously. By restricting the search to the TIB catalogue, you can search exclusively for printed and digital publications in the entire stock of the TIB library.

  27. 2025 Call for Contributions

    For the past 62 years, DAC has been the premier conference for the design and automation of electronic circuits and systems. Research papers, technical presentations and sessions are selected by a committee of electronic design experts that offer the latest information on recent developments, trends, management practices, new products, technologies and methodologies.

  28. Independent investigation of the NHS in England

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  29. House Prices React Rapidly To Rates Shocks

    Articles House Prices React Rapidly To Rates Shocks - BIS Paper [Subscription Required] House prices in the US respond far more quickly to surprising rates decisions than was previously thought, the latest working paper from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) argues. Hoover Institution fellow Marianna Kudlyak and co-authors - say this suggests that the property market constitutes ...