Top ten tips for finding theses

Postgraduate students often ask me about how to find theses. Unfortunately there’s no single source for information on all theses worldwide.

However here are a few tips that might help …
1. All Divinity theses and post 1984 other University of Edinburgh theses are now catalogued onto the online catalogue. See my earlier blog post for tips on searching for New College theses …

2. Older University of Edinburgh theses are listed in sheaf-binder indexes, which are held in the CRC Research Suite – see the useful CRC Guide to Theses

3. Remember that most University of Edinburgh printed theses are kept as archival copies and can only be read in the Library.

4. The Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA) has full text online versions of all Edinburgh University theses submitted from 2005.

5. Go to the Theses subject guide on the University of Edinburgh Library website to find a gateway to information sources from universities worldwide  – such as …

6. [University of Edinburgh restricted] … The Index to Theses database finds details of UK & Ireland theses from 1715- present (no full text)

7. [University of Edinburgh restricted] The Dissertations and Theses database from ProQuest finds details of primarily US & Canada theses. Currently the University of Edinburgh has not subscribed to the full text option, but if you want the full text you could apply for an inter-library loan.

8. New to me is the Networked Library of Theses and Digital Dissertations – SCIRUS Search. This freely available search of public domain theses will include subscribed content from University of Edinburgh subscriptions if you’re on a University network machine, or going through MyEd or VPN at home (No need to alter settings as you would for Google scholar). There’s more full text here than I’d expected.

9. The DART Europe E-Theses portal  – at the time of writing, this is offering access to 362030 open access research theses from 523 Universities in 27 European countries.

10. For theses from further afield, you could try the Center for Research Libraries Global Resources Network.

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