electronic thesis and dissertation wikipedia

• Mission & Vision
• Academic Calendar
• Doctoral Exam Schedule
• Graduate Programs
• Financial Support
• Priority Deadlines
• Catalog and Handbook
• New Graduate Student Orientation
• Signature Events
• Degree Planning
• Embedded Counseling
• International Students
• Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD)
• Graduate Peer Mentoring
• Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR)
• Graduate Assistantships Overview
• Graduate Student Support Plan
• Tuition, Fees and Other Resources
• Fellowships and Grants
• Goodnight Doctoral Fellowship
• University Fellowships Office
• Professional Development
• Five Competencies
• Teaching Programs
• Wellness Program
• Career Readiness Program for Non-Academic Careers
• Communication Skills Program
• Leadership Program
• Office of Postdoctoral Affairs (OPA)
• Faculty & Staff
• Forms and Data
• GSC Resources
• ABGS Resources
• Resources for Student Funding
• Curriculum Development
• Program Assessment
• Recruiting Resources
• Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP)
• Give Now 

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Electronic Theses and Dissertation (ETD) website is a one-stop shop for everything graduate students need for submitting their final documents electronically. The ETD Guide provides step-by-step instructions, with visual examples, to help explain the Graduate School’s formatting and production requirements. Students are encouraged to read the ETD Guide before writing and make sure to refer to the guide throughout the writing process. Using one of our ETD templates can also simplify the formatting process.

Before submitting the first ETD draft, all students should review the ETD Process page , which provides important details about each stage of the ETD review and approval process.  Also, students are encouraged to review this ETD formatting checklist , which covers some common issues.

The NC State Graduate School offers 100% electronic processing for graduate theses and dissertations. This means that all ETD reviews, ETD final submissions, Graduate School and Advisory Committee ETD approvals, and NCSU Library catalogs are electronic. The public may access NC State ETDs online on the library’s repository website.  After consulting the ETD Guide, feel free to send any questions to the ETD Reviewer ( [email protected] ).

• ETD Process 
• Doctoral Required Forms 
• ETD Info/Technical Help 
• ETD Templates 

Search for books, articles, and more

Search the list of databases available through Johns Hopkins

Get started by using subject guides compiled by our librarians

Get Materials

• BorrowDirect Request books and other items from partner libraries. JHED ID required.
• Interlibrary Loan Request scanned articles, chapters, and more from non-JHU libraries. JHED ID required.
• Document Delivery via ILL Request scanned articles and chapters from JHU Libraries and the Libraries Service Center. JHED ID required.
• Journal Search Look for online journals and periodicals available from JHU libraries.
• Citation Linker Find a specific article or book by searching citation information.
• eReserves Access online articles and media reserved for courses.

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (ETDs)

• Submission Checklist
• Formatting Requirements
• Submission Deadlines

An Electronic Thesis or Dissertation (ETD) is a requirement for graduation from Doctoral programs and available to graduates from Masters programs.

What is an ETD?

An electronic thesis or dissertation (ETD) is a digital version of a thesis or dissertation that will be deposited in the JScholarship repository managed by the Sheridan Libraries and be available online to the public.

Universities and colleges in the United States and abroad have been moving toward this type of publication for the past decade. Johns Hopkins started its own ETD program beginning in the fall semester of 2013.

Who does this apply to?

• Required for all PhD Students
• Optional for Masters students with a required thesis; contact your graduate office for information
• Other graduate degrees: Consult with your graduate office

How and when do I submit my ETD?

• Submit after you have defended your thesis or dissertation and made all edits required by your committee
• Follow the formatting requirements
• Login with your JHED ID to the JHU ETD submission system , fill in the required metadata, and upload a PDF/A file of your thesis or dissertation
• The required PDF/A file format is different from a standard PDF. Please see the formatting requirements for further instructions

Fee Payment

The ETD submission fee is $60 and may be paid by credit card or by funds transfer from your department. The fee is due at the time of submission; payment verification is required for approval.

Pay by Credit Card – $60

IMPORTANT: If the card you are using is not your own (e.g., spouse or parent’s card), proceed with the payment at the site, but then email your name, your JHED ID, and the name of the credit card owner to [email protected] so we can link your submission with the payment.

Pay by Department Funds Transfer

NOTE: This option is available at departmental discretion. Request that the department administrator fill out the PDF form and submit it to [email protected] .

Learn More about ETDs

Video tutorials.

A video tutorial of the entire ETD process can be viewed on YouTube

Frequently Asked Questions

No. If your department does not coordinate printing and binding, you might consider Thesis on Demand or PhD Bookbinding . You can upload your PDF, and they will print it, bind it, and ship it to you.

Yes. No individual file can be larger than 512 MB, and the total size of all files cannot exceed 4 GB. If your thesis or dissertation is larger than that, please email [email protected] .

Within two months following degree conferral, ETDs are published to  JScholarship , our institutional repository. There are separate sections in JScholarship for masters theses and doctoral dissertations . If you placed an embargo on your ETD, only the metadata (author, title, abstract, etc.) will be available until the embargo period is up.

Your ETD will be published to our institutional repository, JScholarship , within two months following degree conferral. An ETD is considered published when it is deposited in JScholarship, even if it is under embargo.

Once published, changes cannot be made to your ETD. Your ETD will be published within two months following degree conferral. You are responsible for ensuring your ETD has been thoroughly proofread before you submit to the library.

Students submitting Electronic Theses and Dissertations are responsible for determining any copyright or fair use questions. For assistance, please consult the Copyright LibGuide or contact the librarian listed on the guide.

By default, ETDs are published to JScholarship within two months after you graduate. If you wish to temporarily restrict public access to your ETD, during the ETD submission process you can embargo your document for up to four years. Please note that the title and abstract of your document will still be visible during your embargo. You may release your document from embargo early or extend it up to the four-year maximum by emailing [email protected] . Once your document is publicly accessible, however, we cannot make changes to embargoes.

Contact ETD Office

Milton S. Eisenhower Library [email protected]

ETDs on JScholarship

Electronic theses and dissertations from JHU students. Go to ETDs

JScholarship Home

Open access publications from JHU faculty and students. Visit JScholarship

Please start by reviewing the formatting requirements and submission checklist .

If you have additional questions, email [email protected] for the fastest response.

If we are unable to resolve your inquiry via email, you may request an in-person meeting. Due to the volume of ETDs, we cannot meet on deadline days, or the two days before deadlines.

Please note we do not provide formatting reviews by email, only via the submission system .

Overview of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

What are etds.

An ETD is an openly-accessible electronic version of your thesis or dissertation that will be kept by Duke University Libraries instead of a bound paper copy. The transition to ETDs is a cooperative effort between The Graduate School and the library. All the information presented here comes from these two sources and represents the official policies of Duke University.

How do I submit my thesis or dissertation?

The process is  done online . Step-by-step instructions are provided at the submission site, and formatting guidelines are provided by The Graduate School’s  Guide for Electronic Submission of Thesis and Dissertation (PDF) . The Graduate School also has  Word and LaTex templates .

Initial submission to the Duke Graduate School/ETD availability Kathy Ivanov [email protected] 919-681-5985

ETD copyright or publishing Copyright Consultants Duke University Libraries [email protected]

What are the benefits of open access for my thesis or dissertation?

• Greater visibility helps improve your reputation in your field. Many scholars today do their initial searching on a topic online. Scholars seeking to build their reputation need to make their work accessible in forms actually used by potential colleagues and employers.
• Scholarly communication happens very quickly today. Internet availability is much more beneficial than the long delays and added costs that accompanied library processing and lending of print theses and dissertations.
• Your thesis or dissertation will become part of a growing international collection of ETDs through the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
• Because your work, and the fact that it is your work, will be easy to find, it will be much harder for anyone to appropriate your research without giving you credit.
• Research shows that scholarship available on the internet through open access is cited more often, and is cited sooner, than work that is available only through a subscription or the loan of a print copy.
• Multimedia objects, including color images, hyperlinks, audio, video, spreadsheets and databases, even virtual reality worlds can be easily incorporated into your dissertation and can readily be made available to all of your readers.
• You can include a stable URL for your work in a CV or e-mail it to colleagues and hiring committees. Because our database is OAI compliant, your work also will be found by major search tools.
• Open access more fully embodies the goal of the thesis or dissertation to be a public contribution to scholarship. On the internet your work can reach an audience whose interest in it may have been unforeseeable. New possibilities for interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary research, and the formation of unexpected research collaborations, are created by open access to scholarship.

Table 5. Multimedia use in VT-ETD collection

In terms of copyright, a significant issue is whether to allow the electronic document to be viewed worldwide, on campus only, or not at all. The �mixed� case, which is a unique capability of electronic documents, occurs when some portions (e.g., particular chapters or multimedia files) have restricted access while others are more widely available. The majority of Virginia Tech students allow their documents to be viewable worldwide (see Figure 1) - but some initially choose not to grant worldwide access in order to protect their publication rights. To address this concern, there are ongoing discussions with publishers to help them understand the goals and benefits of NDLTD [ NDLTD, 1999 ]. We are pleased to see a change in attitude by some publishers over the course of the project. The American Chemical Society developed a policy more favorable to NDLTD as a result of lengthy discussions and the American Physics Society has been receptive to issues concerning the Open Archives Initiative and NDLTD.

In order to support many of the current and future research and service-related activities, work has begun to define standards that will enable more consistent exchange of information in an interoperable environment. Among the first of these projects is ETDMS - the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Metadata Standard - and a related project for name authority control.

ETDMS was developed in conjunction with the NDLTD, and has been refined over the course of the last year. The initial goal was to develop a single standard XML DTD for encoding the full text of an ETD. Among other things, an ETD encoded in XML could include rich metadata about the author and work that could easily be extracted for use in union databases and the like. During initial discussions it became clear that the methods used by different institutions to prepare and deal with theses and dissertations would make it all but impossible to agree on a single DTD for encoding the full text of an ETD. Many institutions were unwilling or unprepared to use XML to encode ETDs at all.

Thus, instead of an XML DTD for encoding the full text of an ETD, ETDMS emerged as a flexible set of guidelines for encoding and sharing very basic metadata regarding ETDs among institutions. Separate work continues in parallel on a suite of DTDs, building on a common framework, for full ETDs.

ETDMS is based on the Dublin Core Element Set [ DCMI, 1999 ], but includes an additional element specific to metadata regarding theses and dissertations. Despite its name, ETDMS is designed to deal with metadata associated with both paper and electronic theses and dissertations. It also is designed to handle metadata in many languages, including metadata regarding a single work that has been recorded in different languages. The ETDMS standard [ Atkins, et al., 2001 ] provides detailed guidelines on mapping information about an ETD to metadata elements.

ETDMS already is supported as an output format for the Open Archives interface to the Virginia Tech ETD collection. ETDMS will be accepted as an input format for the union catalog currently being developed in conjunction with VTLS [ VTLS, 2001 ]. NDLTD strongly encourages use of ETDMS.

Each reference to an individual or institution in an ETDMS field should contain a string representing the name of the individual or institution as it appears in the work. In addition, these references also may contain a URI that points to an authoritative record for that individual or institution. Associating authority control with NDLTD seems particularly appropriate since universities know a great deal about those to whom they award degrees and since a thesis or dissertation often is the first significant publication of a student.

The �NDLTD: Authority Linking Proposal� [ Young, 2001 ] identifies several goals for a Linked Authority File (LAF) system to support this requirement:

• LAF records should be freely created and shared among participants. While a central authority database is an option, the LAF design expects the database to be distributed to share cost. Individual participants or groups should be able to host a copy of the LAF database and share changes they make to local copies of LAF records with other hosts using the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol [ Lagoze and Van de Sompel, 2001 ]. The mechanism for keeping records in sync is described in the proposal.
• The URIs should be meaningful and useful to anyone outside NDLTD�s domain. A benefit of using the OAI protocol is that individual LAF records will be accessible via an OAI GetRecord request (discussed in the second part of this article).
• The URIs should be persistent and current. This raises a number of challenges, such as duplicate resolution. By using PURLs [ OCLC, 2001 ] in ETDMS records, the underlying OAI GetRecord URLs can be rearranged without affecting the ETDMS records that rely on them.
• The model should be scalable and applicable beyond NDLTD. The LAF model was designed to work entirely with open standards and open-source software.

The LAF design has other advantages over alternatives such as the Library of Congress Name Authority Database [ Library of Congress, 2001 ]. Only the level of participation among decentralized participants limits the coverage of the collection. Because the records are based on XML, the content of LAF records can be as broad or narrow as needed. Finally, because they are distributed using the OAI protocol, multiple metadata formats can be supported.

The statistics presented illustrate that the production and archiving of electronic theses and dissertations is fast becoming an accepted part of the normal operation of universities in the new electronic age. NDLTD is dedicated to supporting this trend with tools, standards, and services that empower individual institutions to set up and maintain their own collections of ETDs. At the same time NDLTD promotes the use of these ETDs through institutional websites as well as portal-type websites that aggregate the individual sites and create seamless views of the NDLTD collection.

Ongoing research and service-provision projects are addressing the problems of how to merge together the currently distributed and somewhat isolated collections hosted at each member institution. The second part of this article discusses some of these projects in detail, including development of the Union Catalog Portal based on VTLS�s Virtua system and the myriad of research efforts investigating how to provide better services to researchers with specific information-seeking needs and behaviors.

Atkins, Anthony, Edward A. Fox, Robert France and Hussein Suleman (editors). 2001. ETD-ms: an Interoperability Metadata Standard for Electronic Theses and Dissertations -- version 1.00 . Available from < http://www.ndltd.org/standards/metadata/ETD-ms-v1.00.html >.

DCMI. 1999. Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1: Reference Description . Available from < http://www.dublincore.org/documents/dces/ >.

Fox, Edward A. 2000. Core Research for the Networked University Digital Library (NUDL), NSF IIS-9986089 (SGER), 5/15/2000 - 3/1/2002. Project director, E. Fox.

Fox, Edward A., John L. Eaton, Gail McMillan, Neill A. Kipp, Laura Weiss, Emilio Arce, and Scott Guyer. 1996. National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations: A Scalable and Sustainable Approach to Unlock University Resources, D-Lib Magazine , September 1996. Available at < http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september96/theses/09fox.html >.

Fox, Edward A., Brian DeVane, John L. Eaton, Neill A. Kipp, Paul Mather, Tim McGonigle, Gail McMillan, and William Schweiker. 1997. Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations: An International Effort Unlocking University Resources, D-Lib Magazine , September 1997. Available at < http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september97/theses/09fox.html >.

Fox, Edward A., Royca Zia, and Eberhard Hilf. 2000. Open Archives: Distributed services for physicists and graduate students (OAD), NSF IIS-0086227, 9/1/2000-8/31/2003. Project director, E. Fox (w. Royce Zia, Physics, VT, and E. Hilf, U. Oldenburg, PI on matching German DFG project).

Fox, Edward A., J. Alfredo Sánchez, and David Garza-Salazar. 2001. High Performance Interoperable Digital Libraries in the Open Archives Initiative, NSF IIS-0080748, 3/1/2001-2/28/2003. Project director, E. Fox (with co-PIs J.Alfredo S�nchez, Universidad de las Américas-Puebla --- UDLA, and David Garza-Salazar, Monterrey Technology Institute --- ITESM, both funded by CONACyT in Mexico).

Kipp, Neill, Edward A. Fox, Gail McMillan, and John L. Eaton. 1999. FIPSE Final Report , 11/30/99. Available from < http://www.ndltd.org/pubs/FIPSEfr.pdf > (PDF version) and < http://www.ndltd.org/pubs/FIPSEfr.doc > (MS-Word version).

Lagoze, Carl and Herbert Van de Sompel. 2001. The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting . Open Archives Initiative. January 2001. Available from < http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html >.

Library of Congress. 2001. Program for Cooperative Cataloguing Name Authority Component Home Page. Available from < http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/naco.html >.

NDLTD. 1999. Publishers and the NDLTD . NDLTD, July 1999. Available from < http://www.ndltd.org/publshrs/ >.

OCLC. 2001. Persistent URL Home Page. Dublin, OH: OCLC Online Computer Library Center. Available from < http://purl.oclc.org/ >.

Powell, James and Edward A. Fox. 1998. Multilingual Federated Searching Across Heterogeneous Collections. D-Lib Magazine , September 1998. Available at < http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september98/powell/09powell.html >.

VTLS. 2001. Virtua ILS. Available from < http://www.vtls.com/products/virtua >.

Young, Jeffrey A. 2001. NDLTD: Authority Linking Proposal. Dublin, OH: OCLC Online Computer Library Center. Available from < http://alcme.oclc.org/ndltd/AuthLink.html >.

Copyright 2001 Hussein Suleman, Anthony Atkins, Marcos A. Gonçalves, Robert K. France, Edward A. Fox, Vinod Chachra, Murray Crowder, and Jeff Young

Top | Contents Search | Author Index | Title Index | Back Issues Previous Article | Next Article Home | E-mail the Editor

D-Lib Magazine Access Terms and Conditions

DOI : 10.1045/september2001-suleman-pt1

Search form

Welcome to the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Website!

PREPARE: Before You Write

Be prepared with the necessary tools and knowledge to plan your ETD before you begin to write and save hours of hassle. In this section, you will find resources to help you learn to use the ETD templates, map out what you should know about tables and figures, simplify your bibliography by using reference managers, and find the resources and help you need as you begin the writing process.

WRITE: As You Work

When you have questions during the ETD writing process, find the answers you need here. Whether it’s about the craft of writing, the technicalities of the template, or how to use software tools to make your ETD the best it can be, we have a variety of resources for you. In this section, you’ll find help through online tutorials, group workshops and classes, and one-on-one consultations.

SUBMIT: Finish and Share

Due dates and requirements come quickly at the end of your ETD process. What forms are due when? Where can you find your school’s submission and graduation information? How do you pick the right options for submitting your ETD? Who can you ask for help? In this section, you will find the resources you need to finish and submit your ETD and share your work with the world.

About ETDs at the University of Pittsburgh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) at Pitt are one of the final steps in the graduate student experience. However, the ETD process begins early and involves learning new skills and gaining knowledge, both about your research topics as well as about the process of creating and publishing a document. 

This website is broken into steps to help you along the way. When you start the thesis or dissertation process, right after your proposal is accepted, read the material on the "Prepare" page to get you started on the right path and to save you time and frustration later. As you work and write, check back on our "Write" pages for resources that will help you with common questions and problems during the process. And when you are nearing the end, make sure to read the "Submit" pages so that you know what you need to do and when. 

If you are interested in the Pitt ETD program broadly, you can also  search the ETDs or read about the program's history and statistics .

ETD Student Services Staff can login here .

• Directories
• Access Decisions
• Change Requests
• Publishing Your ETD
• Using Previously Published Work in ETDs
• Use of Images in ETDs
• ETD Formatting
• Scholarly Publishing and Open Access
• Start Your Research
• Research Guides
• University of Washington Libraries
• Library Guides
• UW Libraries
• Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs): FAQs

Ownership of etds, what is copyright.

Copyright is the law of authorship. Under copyright owners controls the reproduction, distribution, performance and display of their works. They also control the production of derivative works such as translations. A wide range of works can be copyrighted: literary, musical, dramatic, choreographic, pictorial, sculptural works, motion pictures, sound recordings and computer code. Find out more with our Copyright Guide .

Who owns the copyright of a thesis or dissertation?

The copyright of the thesis or dissertation belongs to the student. Works are automatically copyrighted at the point of creation. If parts of a work have already been published and copyright was transferred to the publisher the copyright of those parts would remain with the publisher.

Do I need to register my copyright?

No, but there are certain benefits of registering. More information from the Copyright Office is available. You may register directly with the Copyright Office for $35 or you can have ProQuest register for you for $55.

Style and Formatting

Do the graduate school or the libraries have requirements for how to format my etd.

Yes and no. The Graduate School has very specific requirements for the first three pages , but is agnostic about the rest of the document. The Libraries does not have specific requirements.

Are there any technical requirements?

ProQuest has guidelines about how to prepare your PDF , including information on embedding fonts, and the best formats for long-term preservation. If your PDF or supplemental files are larger than 1GB you will not be able to use ETD Administrator to upload them; instead, follow these instructions for large files .

How do I make my ETD accessible?

UW takes accessibility very seriously, and we strongly encourage you to make sure that your PDFs are accessible to those using screen readers and other assistive technology. UW's Accessible Technology Office has excellent instructions on how to make your documents are accessible .

How do I decide what font/ citation style/ labels/ etc. to use?

Again, neither the Libraries nor the Graduate School have formatting requirements other than the very specific guidelines for the first three pages . To make your decision, you can do the following:

• Check with your department to see if it has requirements, and check with your advisor to see if they have preferences. If not,
• Figure out if your discipline has best practices or preferences for standards by looking at previously-submitted ETDs . And if all else fails,
• Just pick something and be consistent. If you know you’re going to try to publish in a specific place, one idea is to look for that publisher’s style guide and save yourself time down the road.

ETD Distribution and Access

Why do i have two agreements to review and sign, and what do i need to understand about them.

UW ETD's are distributed by both ProQuest and the UW Libraries. Both will make your work available (ProQuest through its Digital Dissertations database and print sales if you choose to allow that, and the UW Libraries through its ResearchWorks service) and preserve it for the future. In return for those services, both ProQuest and UW require you to certify that the work is your own, and that you are not infringing the rights of others. These agreements also provide a mechanism for all parties to recognize your rights as an author. See the ProQuest agreement and the UW Libraries Agreement

What is open access, and how does it apply to my thesis or dissertation?

Articles, books, theses and dissertations are said to be "open access" when they are "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions." By making publications open access, the widest sharing of ideas and research results is made possible, which is generally done either by publishing in open access journals or depositing them in "repositories" like PubMed Central or the Libraries' ResearchWorks. UW Graduate School policy is for all newly-published UW theses and dissertations to be open access through ResearchWorks, either immediately or after a limited delay. See our LibGuide on Open Access .

Can I use a Creative Commons (CC) license for my thesis or dissertation?

Yes, at your option you can use a CC license for your work. The license will allow you to define how you can share your work with others beyond what is normally allowed as a fair use. To use a CC license first determine which license you want to use - details are at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ . Then you need to add the information to the copyright page of your work - see example below. You can obtain the symbol for your particular license at http://creativecommons.org/about/downloads .

© Copyright 2020 Jane Student

Can I delay or otherwise limit the release of my thesis or dissertation?

Yes. Most students will want to make their theses or dissertations available as soon and as widely as possible, but some may want to delay or limit their release. This is commonly referred to as an "embargo" and may be appropriate when a student wants to allow time to explore publishing part of it in other forms, such as journal articles or a book; it contains material for which a patent might be sought; or it includes other sensitive or confidential information. Embargoes can be placed either on the ProQuest system, the UW Libraries' ResearchWorks, or both. The default selection in both is for no delay or embargo, with delays of 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years available on the ProQuest system, and 1, 2 and 5 years on ResearchWorks. It is also possible to restrict access to the ProQuest system and/or to UW users during the embargo period. See Graduate School Policy and Access Options for Electronic Theses and Dissertations .

When will my thesis or dissertation be available online?

Theses and dissertations go through a multi-stage workflow that begins at the end of the quarter, regardless of when during the quarter you submitted your ETD. This can take 4-6 weeks, and involves processing by the Graduate School, transfer to and additional processing by ProQuest, and then transfer back to UW ResearchWorks. At that point every thesis and dissertation will get a landing page and metadata in ResearchWorks; however, availability of the thesis or dissertation files is determined by the access restrictions you chose when you submitted your ETD.

• << Previous: ETD Formatting
• Next: Scholarly Publishing and Open Access >>
• Last Updated: Oct 2, 2024 5:26 PM
• URL: https://guides.lib.uw.edu/research/etds

Open Access Theses and Dissertations

Thursday, April 18, 8:20am (EDT): Searching is temporarily offline. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to bring searching back up as quickly as possible.

Advanced research and scholarship. Theses and dissertations, free to find, free to use.

Advanced search options

Browse by author name (“Author name starts with…”).

Find ETDs with:

Written in any language English Portuguese French German Spanish Swedish Lithuanian Dutch Italian Chinese Finnish Greek Published in any country US or Canada Argentina Australia Austria Belgium Bolivia Brazil Canada Chile China Colombia Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Greece Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Ireland Italy Japan Latvia Lithuania Malaysia Mexico Netherlands New Zealand Norway Peru Portugal Russia Singapore South Africa South Korea Spain Sweden Switzerland Taiwan Thailand UK US Earliest date Latest date

Sorted by Relevance Author University Date

Only ETDs with Creative Commons licenses

Results per page: 30 60 100

October 3, 2022. OATD is dealing with a number of misbehaved crawlers and robots, and is currently taking some steps to minimize their impact on the system. This may require you to click through some security screen. Our apologies for any inconvenience.

Recent Additions

See all of this week’s new additions.

About OATD.org

OATD.org aims to be the best possible resource for finding open access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world. Metadata (information about the theses) comes from over 1100 colleges, universities, and research institutions . OATD currently indexes 7,262,951 theses and dissertations.

About OATD (our FAQ) .

Visual OATD.org

We’re happy to present several data visualizations to give an overall sense of the OATD.org collection by county of publication, language, and field of study.

You may also want to consult these sites to search for other theses:

• Google Scholar
• NDLTD , the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. NDLTD provides information and a search engine for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), whether they are open access or not.
• Proquest Theses and Dissertations (PQDT), a database of dissertations and theses, whether they were published electronically or in print, and mostly available for purchase. Access to PQDT may be limited; consult your local library for access information.

Global ETD Search

Search the 6,511,267 electronic theses and dissertations contained in the NDLTD archive:

The archive supports advanced filtering and boolean search.

This repository serves as a digital archive for the preservation of research / scholarly output / publications from the University of the western Cape.

Communities in UWCScholar

Select a community to browse its collections.

• Faculty of Arts  
• Faculty of Community and Health Sciences  
• Faculty of Dentistry  
• Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences  
• Faculty of Education  
• 1 (current)

Recent Submissions