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ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT): About

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Subject Coverage

ARTS, BUSINESS, EDUCATION, HUMANITIES and SOCIAL SCIENCES

  • Area, Ethnic and Gender Studies
  • Business
  • Communications and Information Sciences
  • Fine and Performing Arts
  • Education

HUMANITIES

  • History
  • Language & Literature
  • Philosophy and Religion
  • Law and Legal Studies
  • Social Sciences
  • Interdisciplinary

BEHAVIORAL, NATURAL and PHYSICAL SCIENCES

  • Agriculture
  • Architecture
  • Behavioral Sciences
  • Biological Sciences
  • Ecosystem Sciences
  • Engineering
  • Environmental Sciences
  • Geosciences
  • Health and Medical Sciences
  • Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Publication Types

  • Doctoral Dissertations
  • Master's Theses

What is ProQuest Dissertations & Theses?

With more than 3 million entries, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) is the most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses in the world.

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses allows:

  • Graduate students to consult the database to make sure their proposed thesis or dissertation topics have not already been written about
  • Students, faculty, and other researchers to search for titles related to their scholarly interests
  • Instant access to high-quality, multidisciplinary research materials
  • Building your ebooks collection – with each dissertation including an ISBN, ProQuest is the world’s largest publisher of ISBNs
  • Cross-searching with journal and other content types on the ProQuest platform

The database includes bibliographic citations for materials ranging from the first U.S. dissertation, accepted in 1861 as well as European dissertations back from the 17th century, to those accepted as recently as last semester.

 

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses is the official dissertations repository for the Library of Congress and the publishing partner of the National Library of Canada.

The full text of more than 2.1 million of these titles is available in paper, microform, and electronic (if subscription allows) formats. Institutional subscribers to ProQuest Dissertation & Theses Full-Text receive online access to the complete file of dissertations in digital format for hundreds of thousands of titles published before 1997, as well as every title from 1997 forward. 

PQDT offers access to the first 10% of the dissertation (up to 24 pages) for those dissertations and theses available in electronic form.

PQDT is updated weekly and features 24 indexed and searchable fields, including full text searchability.

What is ProQuest Dissertations & Theses - Global?

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global incorporates expanded access to international scholarly works, from the UK to Continental Europe and China.

Our partnerships with universities have been key to expanding the reach and impact of graduate works. By working together, the visibility of both the institution and its PhD dissertation production are enhanced in the worldwide research community.

Now, ProQuest is adding full text for premier academic institutions, such as:

  • University College London
  • University of Aberdeen
  • Cardiff University
  • University of Leicester
  • University of Bath
  • Universitat de València.

Also, ProQuest joined forces with China Academic Library and Information System (CALIS) to provide first-ever global access to abstracts of the graduate output of 80 Chinese Universities.

In summary, PQDT Global offers access to the full range of ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Full Text content plus additional international content (over 1.5 million PHD dissertations in overall). It also includes PQDT - UK & Ireland, which grants access to over 500,000 abstracts from UK & Irish PhD theses (the content from our PQDT - UK & Ireland database).

What is ProQuest Dissertations & Theses - UK & Ireland?

ProQuest Dissertations and Theses — UK & Ireland (also known as Index to Theses) is the most comprehensive available record of doctoral theses from the United Kingdom and Ireland.

The corpus of U.K. and Ireland dissertations and master’s theses in this resource currently comprises over half a million records, with some additional 15,000 citations added annually.

The collection offers:

  • The most comprehensive available listing of theses, with abstracts accepted for higher degrees by universities in the United Kingdom and Ireland, since 1716.
  • Access to bibliographic coverage of theses produced by British and Irish universities.
  • Bibliographic listings for content for 1950-1986.
  • Abstracts for content since 1986.

A growing number of open-access U.K. and Ireland theses are listed on institutional repositories, but they are only a small percentage of the total number of theses produced annually.

Unlike institutional repositories, PQDT — UK & Ireland does not rely on individual academics to upload their works, ensuring coverage from leading British universities. PQDT — UK & Ireland also offers consistent bibliographic standards across all records, and easy cross searching of all U.K. graduate works, as well as global coverage when combined with ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (PQDT).

Selection Policy

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses is the official digital dissertations archive for the Library of Congress and the collection includes work by authors from more than 1,700 graduate schools and universities the world over, and covers every conceivable subject. 

Every major research university in the United States and Canada is represented in the database and there is also a decent and growing international coverage.

Publication Coverage

PQDT offers access to 3 million citations to dissertations and theses from around the world from 1861 to the present day together with over a million full text dissertations that are available for download in PDF format. Over 2.1 million titles are available for purchase as printed copies. The database offers full text for most of the dissertations added since 1997 and strong retrospective full text coverage for older graduate works. Over 80,000 new dissertations and theses are added to the database each year.