LibGuides: Completing Your Master's Thesis or Project: Finding Theses

Finding Former Theses

As a graduate student you may want to reference or build upon work completed by a former CWU graduate student. You can find former CWU Masters thesis in our online and physical theses collections. Physical copies are located on the 2nd floor of the library, in the commons area.

CWU Digital Theses
A digital collection of CWU Masters Theses.

Physical Theses: Using OneSearch to find physical theses can be made easier by following these search steps:

1) Select "CWU Resources" for your search scope

2) Select "Call Number"

3) Search for LD577*

4) Add additional search terms to limit your results

Dissertations & Theses A&I
Citations and abstracts for thousands of doctoral dissertations and master's theses from 1743 to the present.
OAIster
OAIster is a database of over 20 million items held digitally at nearly 1100 libraries, museums, and organizations. Types of files include digitized (i.e., scanned) books and articles; born-digital texts; audio files (e.g., wav, mp3); images (e.g., jpg, gif); movies (e.g., mp4, quicktime); and datasets (e.g., downloadable statistics files).

The Academic Family Tree
PhD Tree has very limited search capability, but it a rich source for theses & dissertations as well as those hard-to-find journal articles. For known bugs see the About page at http://phdtree.org/about/
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE)
Bielefeld University Library operates this excellent search engine "especially for academic open access web resources" which guides you to "more than 50 million documents from more than 2,900 sources. You can access the full texts of about 75% of the indexed documents." How else is it different from commercial search engines? Check this link: http://www.base-search.net/about/en/index.php

The advanced search enables you to limit to theses only, or other document types, as well as limit by date, language, whether open access is known, and a host of other useful features for a targeted search. You may also choose to do a simple search first and apply your limits from the results page. A brief but useful help page is at http://www.base-search.net/about/en/help.php
Digital Commons Network
Bepress hosts this network which has over 900,000 works. Not all are theses or dissertations, but all are free, full text. As far as I can tell, there is no direct way to an advanced search. You have to start with a simple search using the box in the upper right. The results page has options on the left for limiting your search. Unfortunately, the limiters are not consistent from one search to the next, and they are not exclusive of each other. In one search I did, I was offered 3 different limiters that would apply to a search for theses: under "Publication" there were options for "Masters Theses" and "Theses and Dissertations" while under "Publication Type" there was "Theses/Dissertations." A comprehensive search for theses would require checking all 3 individually. The limiter for publication date appears to be by individual year only, not a range. Other limiters include by keywords of their choosing, not yours, discipline, and other characteristics.
Open Access Theses and Dissertations
OATD indexes over 2 million open access electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). It links to, but does not hold, the actual documents. Full text search is limited to about the first 30 pages of the document. Includes some items from the University of Oregon, Oregon State University, Washington State University, the University of Washington, and other institutions in our region, as well as nationally recognized institutions including Duke, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins. Use the advanced search or the facets on the left after the initial search to limit by date, language, country, level of degree, or other characteristics.
Trove, National Library of Australia
Hosted by the National Library of Australia, the content which is indexed and to which they link is worldwide. Use the bar above the search box to select "Books," and use the checkbox under the search box if you want to limit to only material that is available online. After you search, the facets in the left menu enable limiting the material type to theses, if any are available. The results can be further limited, using the left menu, to only "freely available" online: I do not recommend using that because, in my tests, it eliminated all of the "Possibly online" ones. All of those that I tested were available online and free.
Help for finding theses is at http://trove.nla.gov.au/general/theses
General search help is at http://trove.nla.gov.au/general/searchhelp
OpenGrey
OpenGrey indexes European "grey literature" including " technical or research reports, doctoral dissertations, conference papers, official publications," and theses. Subjects covered are "science, technology, biomedical science, economics, social science and humanities." Most of the theses I located in OpenGrey were not available free. Most of them can be requested, for a fee, from a document service such as the British Library. Once you enter your search term(s) and run the search, "Thesis" will be offered as a limiter in the left menu if any are available. Other limiters, including language and date, are available there as well; freely available is not an option as a limiter. Search help is at http://www.opengrey.eu/help.
Theses Canada