Subject guides: Theses: UK Theses

Key UK dissertation and theses resource

ProQuest dissertations & theses global
ProQuest Dissertations and Theses: Global (PQDTGlobal) is the world's most comprehensive collection of full-text dissertations and theses. As the official digital dissertations archive for the Library of Congress and as the database of record for graduate research, PQDTGlobal includes millions of searchable citations to dissertations and theses 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. It also includes PQDT UK & Ireland content.

Finding and accessing UK theses

Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS)
EThOS is the UK’s national thesis service which aims to maximise the visibility and availability of the UK’s doctoral research theses. EThOS aims to provide a national aggregated record of all doctoral theses awarded by UK Higher Education institutions and free access to the full text of as many theses as possible for use by all researchers. There are approximately 440,000 records relating to theses awarded by over 120 institutions of which around 160,000 are available as full text. Requests for many of the remainder can be ordered for scanning through the EThOS digitisation-on-demand facility. You can download digitised PhD thesis from across the UK for free once you have registered on the website. Records are held for all UK PhD-awarding institutions, but EThOS does not yet hold all records for all institutions. This is constantly updated as more theses including University of Manchester outputs from March 2013 are submitted solely in electronic form.

Web of Science Conference Proceedings via Web of Science:
Index to published proceedings for international conferences, symposia, seminars, colloquia, workshops and conventions across a wide range of disciplines. Proceedings relating to Business and Management can be found in the Social Sciences Proceedings on the Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science tab.

Institutional repositories

Most major research universities use institutional repositories to store records of their scholarly work. Institutional repositories are sometimes also used to disseminate research. They are valuable to researchers for various reasons:

Free access to details of research carried out in your area.
Free access to details of research carried out by particular researchers.
Research papers may be available free of charge.
Content can be found by internet search engines such as Google.

Pure is our institutional repository. For other repositories search the Directory of Open Access Repositories.