Theses and dissertations can help you to keep up to date with research in your subject area.
There are different resources to help you find a thesis depending on where it was produced:
Finding a Sussex thesis
The Library holds all doctoral theses written by Sussex research students, and also keeps a small selection of Masters dissertations. You can use the catalogue to search for these items. All theses are reference only and can only be read in the library.
You will need to fill in a Thesis request form (available at the Enquiries desk) to ask that a thesis is collected for you. They are held in the Library store and will be collected at intervals throughout the day.
Finding a UK thesis
There are several sources that can help you find theses submitted at other UK universities.
Index To Theses of Great Britain and Ireland is a database containing details of PhD theses submitted at UK and Irish universities from 1716 onwards. It is searchable by author, title or institution. It does not contain the full text of theses but does have abstracts for those submitted after 1986, and is a useful way of searching for a particular thesis.
EThOS: Electronic Theses Online System is a new service from the British Library that provides online acccess to the fulltext of UK doctoral theses. It replaces the British Library Thesis Service. The EThOS database contains over 250,000 records of doctoral theses from UK Higher Education Institutions. Many of these have already been digitised and are available for immediate download.
How does EThOS work?
- You no longer request theses from other universities through Sussex University's Interlibrary Requests service - you can access them directly through EThOS.
- You do not need to register to search the 250,000 records in the EThOS database, but you will need to register if you would like to download a thesis.
- If the thesis in which you are interested has already been digitised, you will be able to download it immediately without charge.
- If the thesis you need has not yet been digitised, there will be a short delay whilst digitisation takes place. You will then be notified by EThOS when the thesis is ready to be downloaded. Once the thesis has been digitised it is then available for immediate download by any other user.
- Some theses cannot be digitised for copyright reasons. If this is the case with the thesis you need, please inform the Interlibrary Requests team who will investigate whether a hard copy can be borrowed directly from the relevant university.
On rare occasions you may be asked by EThOS to pay for the digitisation of a thesis. This is because, although the majority of institutions participating in EThOS have agreed to pay for the digitisation of their own theses on request, some institutions have not.
In such cases, the Library will pay the cost of digitisation provided that funding is available. Please contact the Interlibrary Requests team on Tel: 01273 678162 (int 8162) or Email: library.interlib@sussex.ac.uk with the full details of your request.
As EThOS is a new service, we will be closely monitoring the cost at Sussex.
Finding an overseas thesis
There are also resources that will help you to locate overseas dissertations, however it is often more difficult to obtain the fulltext of non-UK theses as they are not available through the British Library.
WorldCat is accessible through the Electronic Library, and allows you to search the collections of academic libraries worldwide. Choose 'WorldCat Dissertations' from the dropdown list to restrict your database search to dissertations.
Dissertation Express allows you to buy copies of theses from the US and Canada.
Google Scholar can be a useful tool to identify potential resources.
DART-Europe E-Theses portal contains fulltext E-theses from 12 European countries.
