National Technical Reports Library Search Tips
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Our team of technical information specialists provide directional, technical, and informational help desk support of the NTRL. Telephone assistance is available Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. - 5 p.m. (ET) by calling (703) 605-6585. Email assistance is available from NTRLHelpDesk@ntis.gov
QUICK SEARCH: Use Quick Search for simple searches against the following fields: Accession Number, Title, Date, Report Number, Keywords, Abstract, Report Year and Full Text.
ADVANCED SEARCH: Use Advanced Search to search multiple criteria or to limit the search to a particular field. Any combination of fields can be used. Select the operator between fields from the Choose Operator drop down.
Example: To search for documents published in 2005 about air pollution and authored by Bechtel, enter Keywords: air pollution, Corporate Author: Bechtel, and Published Date: Between January 1, 2005 and December 31, 2005 with the AND operator selected.
SEARCH TIPS FOR BOTH QUICK AND ADVANCED SEARCH:
Strings are automatically stemmed. For example, searching for the term plant produces results for plant, plants and planting.
Multiple search terms are "ANDed" together automatically. This is not an exact phrase search.
Example: ionizing radiation
In Quick Search and in free text fields, such as title, keywords and authors, multiple terms can be combined together with Boolean operators OR, AND, NOT to form a more complex query. The operator must be entered in all uppercase.
Example: "nuclear power plants" AND radiation OR waste
Example: Personal Author: "Jones, P. N." AND "Smith, E. A"
Using Quick Search from the Advanced Search page searches the same fields as the Quick Search page: Accession Number, Title, Date, Report Number, Keywords, Abstract, Report Year and Full Text. The Quick Search can be combined with another field in Advanced Search to retrieve more precise results.
Phrase Search: Use quotes around the search terms to limit the search to results where the terms are adjacent. Stemming is applied to individual terms within the phrase.
Example: "ionizing radiation"
RESULTS DISPLAY:
The Default display shows the Refine filters in the left column. Selecting Citations Only from the Display drop down, removes the refine options from the display and uses the full width of the page to display the citations.
REFINE: Refine filters appear on the left side of the Results page when the Default display is selected. To reduce results or filter the search, select from the Refine options.
Example: Select "ionizing radiation" under Keywords to limit the results to those records with "ionizing radiation" added as a keyword by the indexer. To refine by year, select the Published Year of interest, for example "2009".
SELECTED ADVANCED SEARCH FIELD CONTENT EXAMPLES
Accession Number: Number assigned by NTIS to reflect the order of entry into the NTIS® database. May or may not contain punctuation. Here are few examples:
ACNP-64519(REV)
ACNP64519REV
AD-468 299
AD468299
N95-11834/5
N9511834
PB95-197604
PB95197604
Personal Author: Search by initials and/or last name.
P. N. Jones
Source Agency Code: The codes are limited to 6 characters. Here are a few examples:
DE
DODXA
DIBM
INIS
NASA
EPAOTS
DEE
EPAORD
Keywords: Keywords are identifiers or descriptors assigned by the NTIS indexers. They are assigned to enhance searching and focus on the key concepts in the document.
NTIS Subject Category Code: These codes appear on the results screen on the left side. They are assigned by the NTIS indexers to represent major topic groupings.
Report Number: This number can be an ISBN number, a monitoring agency number, or contractor assigned report number. The format may or may not include punctuation. Here are a few examples:
MAB-139-M(M3)
MAB139MM3
HUMRRO-TR-73
HUMRROTR73
TAOSTAN6961
USCGD2782
Contract Number: Search with punctuation. Here are a few examples:
AC06-76RL01830
NSF C260
AT(04-3)-167
Country of Publication: These are usually 2 letter codes. For example:
UR
FR
UK
NL
FI
SW
CA
Document Type: There are 22 document types. Some of the most common ones are: Technical Report, journal article, conference proceedings, thesis, and patent. The document types appear on the results screen under the Refine filters on the left side.
Issue Number: New titles are announced within the NTRL on an ongoing basis. At the time they are announced, they are assigned a four digit “Issue Number” by NTIS. The first two digits of the Issue Number represent the year of the announcement; while the second two digits represent the NTIS issue in which the title was made publicly available. There are generally 26 issues in a year. For Example: 0907 = Issue number seven during Year 2009. Additional examples:
0509
0711
0920
