Technical Notes - what are they?

Question

I am a new PhD student in aerospace engineering. I am currently already a member of a research group. Suffice it to say I am not in an American institution.

As I learn more about the research culture, I have started have questions about the comparison between journal articles, technical notes, and conference proceedings.

What I noticed here is that it is not uncommon that people get their PhDs without a single journal article publication.

I have seen multiple times people mentioning that they are preparing or that they already have published "technical notes". When I check these technical notes, they look like a few pages long, rather lightweight studies. Am I mistaken? What exactly are these "technical notes"? How do they compare to actual journal publications?

My impression was that conference proceedings are like lightweight versions of the journal publications, but technical notes are something of even less value?

Answer 1

In my experience technical notes (or reports) are usually written primarily for internal use within the group, but may also be somewhat publicly available. For example if your group operates out of some kind of facility, there may be a document repository where this sort of stuff is freely available to everyone else on site.

They are often extremely useful, quite specific/niche, but not necessarily necessarily "new knowledge" and therefore not suitable for a journal. I would not use the term "less value", often there is a lot of hidden treasure in them -- and they are citable within papers submitted to journals (journal dependant). I have seen people include them in their CV's or as a subcategory in their publication lists; especially if it is relevant to the job or position they are applying for.

In terms of classification of academic articles, this varies from field to field quite a lot, so I would ask your supervisor what these terms mean for your area of study.

I would caution against ascribing too much weight to document type. I have seen fantastic work in technical reports, and shoddy work published in prestigious journals. "Don't judge a book by its cover" has never been so pertinent!

Answer 2

As pointed out in the other answer, some institutions have internal "Technical Notes" repositories. The one you're probably encountering in aerospace engineering are the technical notes that NASA and its predecessor organizations collected -- this is the collected wisdom of NASA employees and collaborators who are working out air and space flight over the decades. These specific notes are high quality simply because NASA has been doing great work over decades, and you can generally assume that their contents are gospel in the field.

In decades past, before arXiv was a thing, many institutes, departments, research groups, and others also had their own collection of technical notes. For example, in my field, one of the better known papers is this one:

J.A. Nitsche, Ueber ein Variationsprinzip zur Loesung von Dirichlet-Problemen bei Verwendung von Teilraeumen, die keinen Randbedingungen unterworfen sind, Abhandlungen aus dem Mathematischen Seminar der Universitaet Hamburg 36 (1970/71).

Translated this would be:

J.A. Nitsche, [German title], Transactions of the Mathematical Seminar of the University Hamburg, vol 36 (1970/71).

While this particular paper is important and of high quality, I would not generally assume that all papers in this series are of equally high quality.

So, "technical notes" are sort of every institution's past preprint or research note server, and the quality of these papers will very much depend on how exactly the institution curated their series, and who wrote the articles. Today, most institutions with the exception of the very largest research organizations (like NASA) have long outsourced their own notes series to arXiv, and I don't think that much important stuff is still published this way (with the exception, again, of organizations like NASA).