How can I point the reader of my report to another source for background information?
This is a fairly common kind of citation. Here are some examples, so you can choose one that sounds good to you:

In Baker, Mona. "Corpora in translation studies: An overview and some suggestions for future research." Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 7.2 (1995): 223-243. -


  (For a more detailed overview of text processing operations, see Sinclair 1991a.) 


In Sederberg, Thomas W., and Scott R. Parry. "Free-form deformation of solid geometric models." ACM SIGGRAPH computer graphics 20.4 (1986): 151-160. -


  This paper assumes that the reader is familiar with Bezier curves and surface patches. Necessary background can be found in [Boehm '84]. Basic understanding of solid modeling is also presumed, such as discussed in [Requicha '82]. 


In Vese, Luminita A., and Tony F. Chan. "A multiphase level set framework for image segmentation using the Mumford and Shah model." International journal of computer vision 50.3 (2002): 271-293. -


  For more recent and general expositions on the level set method and applications, we refer the reader to Sethian (1999), Osher and Fedkiw (2001, to appear). 


In Rothlauf, Franz. "Representations for genetic and evolutionary algorithms." Representations for Genetic and Evolutionary Algorithms. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2006. 9-32. -


  For a more detailed overview about different types of representations see Bäck et al. (1997, Sect. C1). 


In Abraham, Farid F., et al. "Instability dynamics of fracture: a computer simulation investigation." Physical Review Letters 73.2 (1994): 272. -


  We refer the reader to Allen and Tildesley [10], Hoover [11], or Abraham [12] for a treatment of the molecular dynamics (MD) simulation technique, including the many procedures for implementing it. 


In Kak, Avinash C., and Malcolm Slaney. Principles of computerized tomographic imaging. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 2001. -


  Interested readers should also consult the paper by Crawford and King [Cra90] and the special issue of Transactions on Medical Imaging [Wan00] for an overview of current approaches. 


It can even be a brief parenthetical. See for example Brown, Judy, and Michael Fraser. "Approaches and perspectives in social and environmental accounting: an overview of the conceptual landscape." Business Strategy and the Environment 15.2 (2006): 103-117. -


  Indeed, legitimacy theory is one of the most widely used frameworks in explaining why organizations voluntarily engage in SEA (see Deegan, 2002, for an overview of this literature). 


Note that in all of these examples, the reference is treated as a normal citation, using the same citation style as all the others in the paper and referring to a source that is included in the list of references.