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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 7,287,308 theses and dissertations.

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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.

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Computer Science > Information Retrieval

Title: search engines in an ai era: the false promise of factual and verifiable source-cited responses.

Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-based applications are graduating from research prototypes to products serving millions of users, influencing how people write and consume information. A prominent example is the appearance of Answer Engines: LLM-based generative search engines supplanting traditional search engines. Answer engines not only retrieve relevant sources to a user query but synthesize answer summaries that cite the sources. To understand these systems' limitations, we first conducted a study with 21 participants, evaluating interactions with answer vs. traditional search engines and identifying 16 answer engine limitations. From these insights, we propose 16 answer engine design recommendations, linked to 8 metrics. An automated evaluation implementing our metrics on three popular engines ( this http URL , this http URL , BingChat) quantifies common limitations (e.g., frequent hallucination, inaccurate citation) and unique features (e.g., variation in answer confidence), with results mirroring user study insights. We release our Answer Engine Evaluation benchmark (AEE) to facilitate transparent evaluation of LLM-based applications.

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EBSCO Open Dissertations

EBSCO Open Dissertations makes electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) more accessible to researchers worldwide. The free portal is designed to benefit universities and their students and make ETDs more discoverable. 

Increasing Discovery & Usage of ETD Research

With EBSCO Open Dissertations, institutions are offered an innovative approach to driving additional traffic to ETDs in institutional repositories. Our goal is to help make their students’ theses and dissertations as widely visible and cited as possible.

EBSCO Open Dissertations extends the work started in 2014, when EBSCO and the H.W. Wilson Foundation created American Doctoral Dissertations which contained indexing from the H.W. Wilson print publication, Doctoral Dissertations Accepted by American Universities, 1933-1955. In 2015, the H.W. Wilson Foundation agreed to support the expansion of the scope of the American Doctoral Dissertations database to include records for dissertations and theses from 1955 to the present.

How Does EBSCO Open Dissertations Work?

Libraries can add theses and dissertations to the database, making them freely available to researchers everywhere while increasing traffic to their institutional repository.  ETD metadata is harvested via OAI and integrated into EBSCO’s platform, where pointers send traffic to the institution's IR.

EBSCO integrates this data into their current subscriber environments and makes the data available on the open web via opendissertations.org .

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Show simple item record

Understanding Google: Search Engines and the Changing Nature of Access, Thought and Knowledge within a Global Context

Files in this item, this item appears in the following collection(s), related items.

Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.

The By-Band study: gastric bypass or adjustable gastric band surgery to treat morbid obesity: study protocol for a multi-centre randomised controlled trial with an internal pilot phase 

Imaginary studies: a science fiction autoethnography concerning the design, implementation and evaluation of a fictional quantitative study to evaluate the umamimi robotic horse ears , the association between childhood fractures and adolescence bone outcomes: a population-based study, the tromsø study, fit futures .

Show Statistical Information

Downloadable Content

Analysis of the application of selected search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and their effectiveness on Google's search ranking algorithm

• Masters Thesis
• Ochoa, Edgar Damian
• Covington, Richard G.
• Melara, Gloria E.
• Noga, John J.
• Computer Science
• California State University, Northridge
• Search engine marketing
• Search engine
• Dissertations, Academic -- CSUN -- Computer Science.
• Search algorithm
• Search engine optimization
• 2012-05-31T20:09:03Z
• http://hdl.handle.net/10211.2/1077
• by Edgar Damian Ochoa
• Includes bibliographical references (pages 123-126)
• California State University, Northridge. Department of Computer Science.
• xi, 126 pages

Items in ScholarWorks are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

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Who (or What) Searches the Search Engines of the Future?

The internet search engine of the future will be powered by artificial intelligence. One can already choose from a host of AI-powered or AI-enhanced search engines—though their reliability often still leaves much to be desired. However, an award-winning team of computer scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently published and released a novel system for evaluating the reliability of AI-generated searches. Called “eRAG,” the method is a way of putting the AI and search engine in conversation with each other, then evaluating the quality of search engines for AI use. 

“All of the search engines that we’ve always used were designed for humans,” says Alireza Salemi , a graduate student in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst and the paper’s lead author. “They work pretty well when the user is a human, but the search engine of the future’s main user will be one of the AI Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT. This means that we need to completely redesign the way that search engines work, and my research explores how LLMs and search engines can learn from each other.”

The basic problem that Salemi and the senior author of the research Hamed Zamani , associate professor of information and computer sciences at UMass Amherst, confront is that humans and LLMs have very different informational needs and consumption behavior. For instance, if you can’t quite remember the title and author of that new book that just published, you can enter a series of general search terms, such as, “what is the new spy novel with an environmental twist by that famous writer,” and then narrow the results down, or run another search as you remember more information (the author is a woman who wrote the novel “Flamethrowers”), until you find the correct result (“Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner — which Google returned as the third hit after following the process above).

But that’s how humans work, not LLMs. They are trained on specific, enormous sets of data, and anything that is not in that data set — like the new book that just hit the stands — is effectively invisible to the LLM. Furthermore, they’re not particularly reliable with hazy requests, because the LLM needs to be able to ask the engine for more information; but to do so, it needs to know the correct additional information to ask.

Related Story

Umass amherst researcher demonstrates ‘extreme boosting’ ai model can cut through social media ‘noise’.

Supervised machine learning promises to advance social media research, finds Viviana Chiu Sik Wu’s review of nonprofit studies.

Computer scientists have devised a way to help LLMs evaluate and choose the information they need, called “retrieval-augmented generation,” or RAG. RAG is a way of augmenting LLMs with the result lists produced by search engines. But of course, the question is, how to evaluate how useful the retrieval results are for the LLMs?

So far, researchers have come up with three main ways to do this: the first is to crowdsource the accuracy of the relevance judgements with a group of humans. However, it’s a very costly method and humans may not have the same sense of relevance as an LLM. One can also have an LLM generate a relevance judgment, which is far cheaper, but the accuracy suffers unless one has access to one of the most powerful LLM models. The third way, which is the gold standard, is to evaluate the end-to-end performance of retrieval-augmented LLMs.

But even this third method has its drawbacks. “It’s very expensive,” says Salemi, “and there are some concerning transparency issues. We don’t know how the LLM arrived at its results; we just know that it either did or didn’t.” Furthermore, there are a few dozen LLMs in existence right now, and each of them work in different ways, returning different answers.

Instead, Salemi and Zamani have developed eRAG, which is similar to the gold-standard method, but far more cost-effective, up to three times faster, uses 50 times less GPU power and is nearly as reliable.

“The first step towards developing effective search engines for AI agents is to accurately evaluate them,” says Zamani. “eRAG provides a reliable, relatively efficient and effective evaluation methodology for search engines that are being used by AI agents.”

In brief eRAG works like this: a human user uses an LLM-powered AI agent to accomplish a task. The AI agent will submit a query to a search engine and the search engine will return a discrete number of results — say, 50 — for LLM consumption. eRAG runs each of the 50 documents through the LLM to find out which specific document the LLM found useful for generating the correct output. These document-level scores are then aggregated for evaluating the search engine quality for the AI agent. 

While there is currently no search engine that can work with all the major LLMs that have been developed, the accuracy, cost-effectiveness and ease with which eRAG can be implemented is a major step toward the day when all our search engines run on AI.

This research has been awarded a Best Short Paper Award by the Association for Computing Machinery’s International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2024). A public python package, containing the code for eRAG, is available at https://github.com/alirezasalemi7/eRAG .

Dissertations, Doctoral Projects, and Theses - Search Engines

When submitting your work to ProQuest, you will choose whether or not you want your work to be indexed and discoverable by Google Scholar and major search engines.

Note that the information below applies only to discoverability through ProQuest. Scholars and researchers will always be able find your thesis or dissertation in DigitalGeorgetown through Google Scholar and major search engines, subject to any approved embargoes .

If you prefer not to have ProQuest make your work discoverable through search engines, during the ProQuest ETD Administrator  submission process, choose the option "I DO NOT want my work to be discoverable in ProQuest through Google Scholar and other major search engines." This option appears on the Publishing Options page -- choose "Show More" in the Search Engine Discovery section for it to appear on your screen. 

Reference management. Clean and simple.

The top list of academic search engines

1. Google Scholar

4. science.gov, 5. semantic scholar, 6. baidu scholar, get the most out of academic search engines, frequently asked questions about academic search engines, related articles.

Academic search engines have become the number one resource to turn to in order to find research papers and other scholarly sources. While classic academic databases like Web of Science and Scopus are locked behind paywalls, Google Scholar and others can be accessed free of charge. In order to help you get your research done fast, we have compiled the top list of free academic search engines.

Google Scholar is the clear number one when it comes to academic search engines. It's the power of Google searches applied to research papers and patents. It not only lets you find research papers for all academic disciplines for free but also often provides links to full-text PDF files.

• Coverage: approx. 200 million articles
• Abstracts: only a snippet of the abstract is available
• Related articles: ✔
• References: ✔
• Cited by: ✔
• Links to full text: ✔
• Export formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver, RIS, BibTeX

BASE is hosted at Bielefeld University in Germany. That is also where its name stems from (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine).

• Coverage: approx. 136 million articles (contains duplicates)
• Abstracts: ✔
• Related articles: ✘
• References: ✘
• Cited by: ✘
• Export formats: RIS, BibTeX

CORE is an academic search engine dedicated to open-access research papers. For each search result, a link to the full-text PDF or full-text web page is provided.

• Coverage: approx. 136 million articles
• Links to full text: ✔ (all articles in CORE are open access)
• Export formats: BibTeX

Science.gov is a fantastic resource as it bundles and offers free access to search results from more than 15 U.S. federal agencies. There is no need anymore to query all those resources separately!

• Coverage: approx. 200 million articles and reports
• Links to full text: ✔ (available for some databases)
• Export formats: APA, MLA, RIS, BibTeX (available for some databases)

Semantic Scholar is the new kid on the block. Its mission is to provide more relevant and impactful search results using AI-powered algorithms that find hidden connections and links between research topics.

• Coverage: approx. 40 million articles
• Export formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, BibTeX

Although Baidu Scholar's interface is in Chinese, its index contains research papers in English as well as Chinese.

• Coverage: no detailed statistics available, approx. 100 million articles
• Abstracts: only snippets of the abstract are available
• Export formats: APA, MLA, RIS, BibTeX

RefSeek searches more than one billion documents from academic and organizational websites. Its clean interface makes it especially easy to use for students and new researchers.

• Coverage: no detailed statistics available, approx. 1 billion documents
• Abstracts: only snippets of the article are available
• Export formats: not available

Consider using a reference manager like Paperpile to save, organize, and cite your references. Paperpile integrates with Google Scholar and many popular databases, so you can save references and PDFs directly to your library using the Paperpile buttons:

Google Scholar is an academic search engine, and it is the clear number one when it comes to academic search engines. It's the power of Google searches applied to research papers and patents. It not only let's you find research papers for all academic disciplines for free, but also often provides links to full text PDF file.

Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature developed at the Allen Institute for AI. Sematic Scholar was publicly released in 2015 and uses advances in natural language processing to provide summaries for scholarly papers.

BASE , as its name suggest is an academic search engine. It is hosted at Bielefeld University in Germany and that's where it name stems from (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine).

CORE is an academic search engine dedicated to open access research papers. For each search result a link to the full text PDF or full text web page is provided.

Science.gov is a fantastic resource as it bundles and offers free access to search results from more than 15 U.S. federal agencies. There is no need any more to query all those resources separately!

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Resources to Find Dissertations: Home

Description.

This page provides links to databases and websites to find dissertations. This includes links to general databases to find dissertations, databases focused on the humanities, foreign dissertations, dissertations on religion, and dissertations hosted by other universities.

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Humanities dissertations, foreign dissertations, religion dissertations, dissertations of universities, yale divinity library.

Science Dissertations

• Last Updated: Aug 22, 2024 5:30 PM
• URL: https://guides.library.yale.edu/dissertations

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• RIT Libraries
• Thesis and Dissertation Resources
• Databases and Websites
• Thesis Writing Guides
• Writing in Engineering and Science

Why search this literature?

It is crucial for graduate students to search the thesis and dissertation literature to make sure that an idea or hypothesis has not already been tested, explored, and published.  An additional reason to search this literature is that it is rich with ideas and information not found elsewhere.  If graduate students do not continue on as academics or if students that came after them in their programs did not continue their research, this literature may be the end of the line for scholarship on a topic.

ProQuest has published dissertation e-learning modules covering the usefulness of using dissertations as a research source.  See link below:

• Dissertation eLearning resources from ProQuest Uncover the value of dissertations.

Library Databases

All graduate students should, at minimum, search the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global database (PQDT) to see if the research they are proposing to do has already been done by a student at another institution/university.  RIT dissertations and theses have been included in PQDT since approximately 2006.

• Proquest Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new window Identifies Ph.D. dissertations from U.S. & Canadian universities since 1861. Abstracts from 1980. Master's theses from 1988. Many with full-text.

RIT Digital Institutional Repository

• Digital Institutional Repository The digital institutional repository for the Rochester Institute of Technology, managed by RIT Libraries.
• ProQuest - Most Accessed Dissertations/Theses

Each month ProQuest updates this list of the top 25 Most-Accessed Dissertations and Theses across all subjects, based upon total PDF downloads. Find out what is trending.

The web sites below should also be consulted as appropriate to perform a full and thorough review of the dissertation and thesis literature beyond your introductory search of ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.  Consider whether a particular country or part of the world would have an interest in your potential research topic.

Only large-scale repositories of dissertations and theses are included here. You may also need to search individual university repositories directly.

• Ebsco Open Dissertations Search thousands of open dissertations and theses from over 50 participating libraries.
• EThOS (from the British Library) EThOS offers a 'single point of access' where researchers the world over can access ALL theses produced by UK Higher Education.
• Indian Institute of Science Dissertations and theses from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India.
• Indian Theses and Dissertations (Shodhganga) Over 130 participating Indian universities and over 8800 ETD documents.
• National ETD Portal (South Africa) South African theses and dissertations.
• Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), is an international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination, and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). The NDLTD Union Catalog contains more than one million records of electronic theses and dissertations. Search the Union Catalog from here: http://thumper.vtls.com:6090/?theme=NDLTD
• OhioLINK ETD Center Electronic theses and dissertations from colleges and universities in the state of Ohio.
• Open Access Theses and Dissertations OATD 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 600 colleges, universities, and research institutions. OATD currently indexes over 1.5 million theses and dissertations. RIT is included.
• Theses Canada Canadian universities voluntarily participate by submitting approved theses and dissertation to Theses Canada. Click on "Search Theses Canada" under the Introduction on the left hand side of the page to begin your search.
• TROVE From the National Library of Australia - Search Trove to explore amazing collections from Australian libraries, universities, museums, galleries and archives.
• Next: Thesis Writing Guides >>

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Dissertations and theses from other colleges and universities: Finding dissertations on your topic

• Finding dissertations on your topic
• Finding a specific dissertation
• Online PhDs via the British Library

Summon and ProQuest

Summon has a relatively small number of dissertations, which you will find while running a general search. It is possible to filter your search by choosing CONTENT TYPE - Dissertation . To filter, you may need to use the More... option to see all content types, and then, once you  have selected the Dissertation option, select Apply : 

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global: Humanities and Social Sciences Large collection of doctoral and masters' dissertations.    Sotheby's Institute of Art - New York  dissertations from 2011 onwards are included. pass.  All content should appear reliably in Summon.   Some content from EThOS (see immediately below) is now duplicated in ProQuest, but not all: so it is better to search in Summon or directly in EThOS for UK doctoral dissertations.

Online PhDs via the British Library For PhDs submitted to British universities.  See separate section of this guide .

More options

There are many more options, listed here roughly in order of importance:

Global ETD (Electronic Thesis and Dissertation) Search Search engine for free online copies of dissertations. 

Open Access Theses and Dissertations Seems to offer similar results to Global ETD.

EBSCO Open Dissertations Largely duplicates content found in Summon, but includes some titles not found there.

Repositories Have been created by many universities and other degree-awarding institutions. These are free online stores of the scholarly material they have produced, usually including dissertations.  The key information about this kind of database is in the  repositories guide . The guide includes links to search engines for searching across many repositories at once.

DART-Europe E-theses Portal Provides free online copies of dissertations from many European countries, including some not found by Global ETD (see above).

Courtauld Institute: recently completed PhD theses .  A list of recent work from the Courtauld, more up-to-date than any other source. The PhDs are not available online; to read them you will need to contact the  Courtauld book library . Dissertations are stored off-campus, so you will need to make an appointment a few days in advance.

College Art Association: list of dissertations completed and in progress Details of PhD dissertations in art history and visual studies from US and Canadian institutions. Titles can be browsed by subject category or year. The dissertations themselves are not available via this site.

Theses Canada Doctoral and master's dissertations from Canada.  Many of the records in this database are only citations. Choose the option  Electronic theses only  to limit your search to those available online.  

Dissertations in physical form

London and the rest of the UK

Library Hub Discover searches the collections of important academic libraries in Britain (plus Trinity College Dublin). Many (but not all) universities list their dissertations in this catalogue. There are rarely links to online dissertations. 

Library Hub Discover will not tell you whether you have access rights to a particular library. To check this, visit the  other libraries guide , visit the website of the library you want to visit, or ask the SIA librarians if you still need help.  Please note that a few important university libraries are not included in Library Hub Discover.

To focus your search in Library Hub Discover, first go to Advanced Search .

Enter title words or keywords as you wish. Then select Theses from the Document Type menu:

Your selection will appear in the Selected Document Types in the right hand pane. You can now run your search.

• video intro to Library Hub Discover (3 mins)
• comprehensive guide to Library Hub Discover

Libraries worldwide

WorldCat  finds hard-copy dissertations from libraries around the world.  After running your search, you can filter your results to find dissertations only:

• << Previous: Overview
• Next: Finding a specific dissertation >>
• Last Updated: Oct 28, 2024 6:59 AM
• URL: https://sia.libguides.com/otherdissertations

How to find resources by format

Why use a dissertation or a thesis.

A dissertation is the final large research paper, based on original research, for many disciplines to be able to complete a PhD degree. The thesis is the same idea but for a masters degree.

They are often considered scholarly sources since they are closely supervised by a committee, are directed at an academic audience, are extensively researched, follow research methodology, and are cited in other scholarly work. Often the research is newer or answering questions that are more recent, and can help push scholarship in new directions. 

Search for dissertations and theses

Locating dissertations and theses.

The Proquest Dissertations and Theses Global database includes doctoral dissertations and selected masters theses from major universities worldwide.

• Searchable by subject, author, advisor, title, school, date, etc.
• More information about full text access and requesting through Interlibrary Loan

NDLTD – Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations provides free online access to a over a million theses and dissertations from all over the world.

WorldCat Dissertations and Theses searches library catalogs from across the U.S. and worldwide.

Locating University of Minnesota Dissertations and Theses

Use  Libraries search  and search by title or author and add the word "thesis" in the search box. Write down the library and call number and find it on the shelf. They can be checked out.

Check the  University Digital Conservancy  for online access to dissertations and theses from 2007 to present as well as historic, scanned theses from 1887-1923.

Other Sources for Dissertations and Theses

• Center for Research Libraries
• DART-Europe E-Thesis Portal
• Theses Canada
• Ethos (Great Britain)
• Australasian Digital Theses in Trove
• DiVA (Sweden)
• E-Thesis at the University of Helsinki
• DissOnline (Germany)
• List of libraries worldwide - to search for a thesis when you know the institution and cannot find in the larger collections
• ProQuest Dissertations Express  - to search for a digitized thesis (not a free resource but open to our guest users)

University of Minnesota Dissertations and Theses FAQs

What dissertations and theses are available.

With minor exceptions, all doctoral dissertations and all "Plan A" master's theses accepted by the University of Minnesota are available in the University Libraries system. In some cases (see below) only a non-circulating copy in University Archives exists, but for doctoral dissertations from 1940 to date, and for master's theses from 1925 to date, a circulating copy should almost always be available.

"Plan B" papers, accepted in the place of a thesis in many master's degree programs, are not received by the University Libraries and are generally not available. (The only real exceptions are a number of old library school Plan B papers on publishing history, which have been separately cataloged.) In a few cases individual departments may have maintained files of such papers.

In what libraries are U of M dissertations and theses located?

Circulating copies of doctoral dissertations:.

• Use Libraries Search to look for the author or title of the work desired to determine location and call number of a specific dissertation. Circulating copies of U of M doctoral dissertations can be in one of several locations in the library system, depending upon the date and the department for which the dissertation was done. The following are the general rules:
• Dissertations prior to 1940 Circulating copies of U of M dissertations prior to 1940 do not exist (with rare exceptions): for these, only the archival copy (see below) is available. Also, most dissertations prior to 1940 are not cataloged in MNCAT and can only be identified by the departmental listings described below.  
• Dissertations from 1940-1979 Circulating copies of U of M dissertations from 1940 to 1979 will in most cases be held within the Elmer L. Andersen Library, with three major classes of exceptions: dissertations accepted by biological, medical, and related departments are housed in the Health Science Library; science/engineering dissertations from 1970 to date will be located in the Science and Engineering Library (in Walter); and dissertations accepted by agricultural and related departments are available at the Magrath Library or one of the other libraries on the St. Paul campus (the Magrath Library maintains records of locations for such dissertations).  
• Dissertations from 1980-date Circulating copies of U of M dissertations from 1980 to date at present may be located either in Wilson Library (see below) or in storage; consult Libraries Search for location of specific items. Again, exceptions noted above apply here also; dissertations in their respective departments will instead be in Health Science Library or in one of the St. Paul campus libraries.

Circulating copies of master's theses:

• Theses prior to 1925 Circulating copies of U of M master's theses prior to 1925 do not exist (with rare exceptions); for these, only the archival copy (see below) is available.  
• Theses from 1925-1996 Circulating copies of U of M master's theses from 1925 to 1996 may be held in storage; consult Libraries search in specific instances. Once again, there are exceptions and theses in their respective departments will be housed in the Health Science Library or in one of the St. Paul campus libraries.  
• Theses from 1997-date Circulating copies of U of M master's theses from 1997 to date will be located in Wilson Library (see below), except for the same exceptions for Health Science  and St. Paul theses. There is also an exception to the exception: MHA (Masters in Health Administration) theses through 1998 are in the Health Science Library, but those from 1999 on are in Wilson Library.

Archival copies (non-circulating)

Archival (non-circulating) copies of virtually all U of M doctoral dissertations from 1888-1952, and of U of M master's theses from all years up to the present, are maintained by University Archives (located in the Elmer L. Andersen Library). These copies must be consulted on the premises, and it is highly recommended for the present that users make an appointment in advance to ensure that the desired works can be retrieved for them from storage. For dissertations accepted prior to 1940 and for master's theses accepted prior to 1925, University Archives is generally the only option (e.g., there usually will be no circulating copy). Archival copies of U of M doctoral dissertations from 1953 to the present are maintained by Bell and Howell Corporation (formerly University Microfilms Inc.), which produces print or filmed copies from our originals upon request. (There are a very few post-1952 U of M dissertations not available from Bell and Howell; these include such things as music manuscripts and works with color illustrations or extremely large pages that will not photocopy well; in these few cases, our archival copy is retained in University Archives.)

Where is a specific dissertation of thesis located?

To locate a specific dissertation or thesis it is necessary to have its call number. Use Libraries Search for the author or title of the item, just as you would for any other book. Depending on date of acceptance and cataloging, a typical call number for such materials should look something like one of the following:

Dissertations: Plan"A" Theses MnU-D or 378.7M66 MnU-M or 378.7M66 78-342 ODR7617 83-67 OL6156 Libraries Search will also tell the library location (MLAC, Health Science Library, Magrath or another St. Paul campus library, Science and Engineering, Business Reference, Wilson Annex or Wilson Library). Those doctoral dissertations still in Wilson Library (which in all cases should be 1980 or later and will have "MnU-D" numbers) are located in the central section of the third floor. Those master's theses in Wilson (which in all cases will be 1997 or later and will have "MnU-M" numbers) are also located in the central section of the third floor. Both dissertations and theses circulate and can be checked out, like any other books, at the Wilson Circulation desk on the first floor.

How can dissertations and theses accepted by a specific department be located?

Wilson Library contains a series of bound and loose-leaf notebooks, arranged by department and within each department by date, listing dissertations and theses. Information given for each entry includes name of author, title, and date (but not call number, which must be looked up individually). These notebooks are no longer current, but they do cover listings by department from the nineteenth century up to approximately 1992. Many pre-1940 U of M dissertations and pre-1925 U of M master's theses are not cataloged (and exist only as archival copies). Such dissertations can be identified only with these volumes. The books and notebooks are shelved in the general collection under these call numbers: Wilson Ref LD3337 .A5 and Wilson Ref quarto LD3337 .U9x. Major departments of individual degree candidates are also listed under their names in the GRADUATE SCHOOL COMMENCEMENT programs of the U of M, available in University Archives and (for recent years) also in Wilson stacks (LD3361 .U55x).

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