Theses and Dissertations from Other Universities

Each institution handles publication of its theses and dissertations differently, so getting access to specific papers can sometimes be a challenge.

Finding a specific thesis or dissertation

• Proquest Dissertations & Theses is a database that collects the full text of theses and dissertations from many R1 institutions, available for immediate download. This is a good first place to check for the full text of a paper.
• Google Scholar indexes many theses and dissertations in its database. It also provides immediate access to full text through many institutional repositories.
• Check with the institution: If you know the institution where a paper was published, you can check the library website for that institution to see if they've made the text available online.
• Interlibrary Services: If you have a citation for a paper but can't find the full text, you can request the thesis or dissertation using Interlibrary Services, a free resource. It may take several days to several weeks for us to get access to the paper, and depending on the paper and the institution it may arrive via email or in print.

Finding theses and dissertations on a particular topic

• Proquest Dissertations & Theses supports searching by topic, and all the results in the database will be theses or dissertations issued by participating universities.
• Google Scholar supports searching by topic and does a great job indexing theses and dissertations, but it doesn't provide an easy way to limit results to just theses and dissertations. It's still a useful tool for searching for these papers by topic, though peer-reviewed articles and white papers may be included in the results, too

If you need help finding a thesis or dissertation from another institution, contact the librarian below, or Ask Us for immediate assistance.