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Locating Gray Literature: Conferences, Technical Reports, E-Prints


ACS Meeting Abstracts and Papers

ACS Abstracts of Papers
The American Chemical Society publishes abstracts of papers to be presented at technical sessions of the ACS National Meetings.

  • Abstracts of the current meeting only are available on the ACS National Meetings web site. There is no archive.
  • The abstracts (without graphics) are included in SciFinder. In Chemical Abstracts the title was abbreviated as "Abstr. Pap. Am. Chem. Soc." and more recently appears as "Abstracts of Papers, [N]th ACS National Meeting, [place], [date]"
  • 1937-2005: Abstracts of papers - American Chemical Society are available as printed volumes in the library, shelved in the journal stacks after JACS.
  • 2006- : the abstracts are published only on CD-ROM, available on Reserves. These CDs typically arrive long after the meeting is over.
  • 2007- : the title changed to Abstracts of scientific papers.
  • Unless the paper was also published as a preprint from one of the Divisions listed below, or as a postprint within a separate proceedings volume, there are no published versions of the full papers -- the abstract is all there is. Contact the authors for more information.
  • Don't confuse the "ACS abstracts" with Chemical Abstracts, which is a wholly different thing.

ACS Division Preprints star
Five technical divisions of the American Chemical Society publish preprints or extended abstracts of papers in advance of national meetings. Formerly in print, they are now published on CD-ROM and are kept on Media Reserves in the Chemistry Library. (Receipt of CD-ROMs is not always timely.) The preprints (excluding FUEL) are also available on the Web to institutional subscribers including UT Austin via the ACS Proceedings site. Earlier years have not been digitized. Preprints are separately indexed by CAS.

Division Library Holdings
Environmental Chemistry Division Preprints Extended Abstracts U.T. restricted Print: 1973-99 (incomplete)
CD-ROM: 2000-06
Web: 2004-
Fuel Chemistry Preprints Print: 1960-2002
CD-ROM: 2003-
Web: 2001- (for division members only)
Petroleum Division Preprints U.T. restricted Print: 1942-2005
CD-ROM: 2006-
Web: 2002-
Polymer Preprints U.T. restricted Print: 1962-2004
CD-ROM: 2005-
Web 2000-
Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering (PMSE Preprints) U.T. restricted Print: 1983-2001
CD-ROM: 2002-07
Web: 2001-

Other ACS Proceedings
Topical symposia held at ACS meetings have often collected papers into proceedings volumes after the fact. The two most important series are:
  • ACS Symposium Series (1974-present, shelved in Book Stacks at QD 1 A447)
  • Advances in Chemistry Series (1950-1998, each volume classed separately in Book Stacks)
Search for these volumes in the Library Catalog by series/volume number or individual book title. Most papers in ACS Symp. Ser. volumes are indexed in Chemical Abstracts (SciFinder Scholar).

Conference Papers and Proceedings

Thousands of scientific conferences and symposia, large and small, take place every year. Some of them publish proceedings, collections of papers presented at the meeting. Proceedings can be published as books (such as volumes of the ACS Symposium Series) or in special journal issues. Some conferences publish abstracts or preprints of papers to be presented at an upcoming conference. Others distribute proceedings on site in CD-ROM format. Many conferences publish nothing at all. Presentations at conferences may be cited in later literature even if nothing was actually published. If a bibliography contains a citation that looks something like this:

Smith, H.L., 5th Int. Symp. Chem. Phys., February 2001.

lacking page numbers or publisher information, this most likely refers to an unpublished conference presentation.

Here are some places you could search to find that elusive conference:
  • Search the conference name as an author or as keywords in the Library Catalog.
  • Search in WorldCat, using words from the full name of the conference as a conference name query.
  • Search the paper's author(s) in an index database such as Chemical Abstracts. While an unpublished conference paper will not be indexed, you might find a later journal article based on it. Work-in-progress is often presented at conferences and then later submitted to journals.
  • Search in Google or other engine. An author might have posted a copy of the paper or a slide presentation in an open repository or web site.
  • InterDok Directory of Published Proceedings is a database of thousands of scholarly and professional meetings and offers proceedings (not single papers) for sale. Interdok's MInd, the Meetings Index allows you to locate future conferences, congresses, meetings and symposia.
  • Proceedings.com from Curran Associates is a vendor service that prints and sells hardcopy conference proceedings (not single papers) from many professional organizations that are otherwise available only in electronic formats or to members.
  • Try contacting the paper's author.

 

Technical Reports

Technical reports usually originate in federal government agencies, but may also come from academic institutions, state or foreign governments, and private firms and organizations. They contain results of research carried out on government contracts or, in the case of corporations, for in-house, proprietary use. They are often cited in articles and indexed in databases, yet in some cases they can be quite difficult to verify and obtain. Major U.S. government sources include:
  • Department of Defense (DOD)
  • Department of Energy (DOE and its predecessors the AEC, ERDA, etc.)
  • Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
  • NASA (and its predecessor NACA)
  • National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, formerly the National Bureau of Standards, NBS)
  • Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC or NUREG)

Technical reports are usually referenced by author(s), title, and report number. Report number formats vary widely according to the issuing agency's own numbering system. Some examples:

  • EPA/600/S2-86/051 (EPA)
  • NASA-TM-111279 (NASA)
  • PB95-187282 (NTIS accession number)
  • AD-A417298 (DOD)
  • SAND-83-2301/2 (DOE)
Government tech reports are primarily distributed on microfiche. Some research libraries have large collections of these reports, while others have relatively few. UT's Engineering Library has extensive collections of NASA reports in print and on fiche, but does not have many reports from other agencies. Libraries generally don't catalog government tech reports individually, so they will not be found in library catalogs. A few of them are available on the web, but most are not. Consulting a librarian in advance may save you much time.

Here are some web sites that can help you track down tech reports and other gray information.
Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)
Public access to bibliographic data and some full text of unclassified DoD documents and technical reports since 1974.

DOE Data Explorer
A metasearch tool for public DOE data collections (not tech reports per se) - such as computer simulations, numeric data files, figures and plots, interactive maps, multimedia, and scientific images - generated in the course of DOE-sponsored research in various science disciplines.

Energy Citations Database star
Contains over 2 million bibliographic records and over 200,000 full text PDF documents for energy-related information from the Department of Energy (DOE) and its predecessor agencies, the Energy Research & Development Administration (ERDA) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The database covers 1943 to the present but is not comprehensive.

EPA Publications Source
Gateway to various EPA publication catalogs for online and printed documents and reports. See also EPA's NSCEP/NEPIS gateway to free digital and paper publications. Warning: EPA documents can be very difficult to find! For more information on EPA analytical methods see the Analytical Chemistry pathfinder.

NASA Technical Reports Server
The NTRS collects scientific and technical information from NASA's technical report servers and non-NASA sites using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. It is not a comprehensive index of NASA reports, however. This site now also includes NACA aerospace reports from NASA's predecessor agency (1917-58).

NIST/NBS Catalog
The online catalog of the NIST library provides access to selected report series that have been digitized.

NTIS
NTIS (National Technical Information Service) is the primary clearinghouse for government technical reports. Their free web catalog lists reports since 1964. However, the records include only author and title and lack report numbers, abstracts, and agency information, making this version of limited usefulness. If you need a search of a more complete NTIS database contact the Engineering Library. Individual reports must be purchased directly from NTIS and can't be requested via interlibrary loan.

Science.gov
A search engine covering nearly 2,000 federal government web sites and databases.

TRAIL: Technical Report Archive and Image Library
A pilot collaborative project to digitize, archive, and provide persistent and unrestricted access to selected federal technical reports issued prior to 1975.

More Info about Tech Reports

UT Engineering Library Technical Reports

Stanford Engineering Library

Virtual Tech Reports Center (Univ. of Maryland)
The institutions listed on this site provide either full text reports, or searchable extended abstracts of their technical reports on the Web. This site contains links to technical reports, preprints, reprints, dissertations, theses, and research reports of all kinds, mostly non-governmental. Some meta-sites are listed by subject categories, as well as by institution.

E-Prints

"E-prints" are typically draft or final versions of papers accepted for publication in scientific journals that are deposited by authors in special repositories. Open distribution of e-prints is very important in fields like physics; much less so in chemistry.

Archiv.org star
Formerly the Los Alamos e-print server, this is a massive collection of preprints in physics, math, and computer science.

E-Print Network (DOE)
A gateway to over 12,000 Web sites and databases worldwide, containing e-prints in basic and applied sciences, primarily in physics but also including subject areas such as chemistry, biology and life sciences, materials science, nuclear sciences and engineering, energy research, computer and information technologies, and other disciplines of interest to DOE.