Mat-Su College: Writing

Government documents usually mean documents published by the U.S. Federal Government. Examples of government documents include Senate bills, reports published by government agencies like the FDA or EPA, and so on. Government documents often share lots of statistics. They can be a rich source of information.

Depending on your needs, you might also look for documents written by state or local governments.

You might also look at documents published by non-governmental organizations (NGOs); these groups are by definition independent of governments, but the largest NGOs publish very thorough reports. (Examples of big, international NGOs would be Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, Survival International, Greenpeace, etc.)

Historically, recent government publications have been freely available online. That has changed since 2025. If you suspect the data you're looking for has been censored from government websites, take a look at the University of Minnesota's "Finding Government Information during the 2025 Administration Transition" guide.

With that out of the way, there are a few easy ways to find government data.

1. Use USA.gov

The usa.gov website is a search engine for US government websites. When you search with it, you search only government websites.

2. Use "QuickSearch" on library website.

The Mat-Su College library website has a QuickSearch search box. Enter your search terms. In the results, click "Government Document" under the "Content Type" filter list:

3. Use Google with advance searched techniques

You can use Google to find government documents if you use a few advanced features. Google allows you to limit your search to certain websites and to certain files.

To begin with, you can limit your searches to .gov sites (government sites) by adding site:.gov to your search. If you wanted to search for government websites about water quality you could type water quality site:.gov. If you want to search just a single website, you can do that too, e.g., water quality site:epa.gov

You can also use Google's advanced features to find PDFs on these sites, rather than just plain webpages. It can be good to limit your searches to PDFs because PDFs are how finished reports are often stored. You can use filetype:pdf to limit your search to PDFs.

So, to find PDFs on the epa.gov site, your search might look like this: water quality site:epa.gov filetype:pdf. (Screenshot below.)