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Research Guides@Tufts

Dissertations and Theses

Resources for finding and writing theses & dissertations at Tufts

Dissertations and theses as a research tool

Theses and dissertations can be a valuable source of information for research.  They can offer the following benefits:

  • Just like journal articles, conference proceedings, and other forms of literature, they present original research. Recently completed theses can provide "sneak previews" of ideas and findings that have yet to reach the public via other publication formats.
  • They may be the only publicly-available work by authors who do not otherwise publish for general audiences or through commercial publishers.
  • They contain extensive bibliographies.
  • They provide inspiration for the formatting and presentation of ideas, graphs, charts, and other components of a document.
  • They provide insight into the early work of a particular person and have value for historical and biographical purposes.

Obtaining theses & dissertations written at other institutions

Want to borrow a thesis or dissertation written at another institution that isn't available in full text online? Request it via ILLIAD, Tufts' interlibrary loan service. Choose the "Thesis" request form and provide as much descriptive information as you can. Not all theses or dissertations are available or loanable, but we'll try to find you a copy!

Some other ways you might be able to find a copy of an older dissertation:

  • If you can identify the author's institutional affiliation, visit that institution's webpage to see if they catalog or archive students' dissertations. 

  • Contact the author.  Some authors will post all or some of their dissertation on their website or have journal articles or other publications which draw heavily on this work.

  • Search the author's name and/or thesis title in full-text journal databases which include article references. These citations may provide clues as to how to locate the document.

  • Contact your subject librarian for assistance.

Citing dissertations and theses

As with journal articles, books, and other sources, theses and dissertations must be properly cited in any document that references them.  Most citation styles, including APA, Chicago, and MLA, provide specific instructions for formatting these citations.  Citation Management tools, such as EndNote and Zotero, automatically format references for these sources in your selected citation style.  More information is in the Citing Sources guide.

Although requirements for citing dissertations vary according by style, they generally seek to convey the following information:  that the item is a dissertation (rather than an article or a book); the type of degree it resulted in (master's, PhD, etc); whether it was published; and which institution granted the degree.  An example of a citation for a dissertation is presented here in four major citation styles:

  • APA:  Miaoulis, I. N. (1987). Experimental investigation of turbulence spectra of charge density fluctuations in the equilibrium range. Unpublished Ph.D., Tufts University, United States -- Massachusetts.
  • Chicago:  Miaoulis, Ioannis Nikolaos. "Experimental Investigation of Turbulence Spectra of Charge Density Fluctuations in the Equilibrium Range." Ph.D., Tufts University, 1987.
  • IEEE:  [1]    I. N. Miaoulis, "Experimental investigation of turbulence spectra of charge density fluctuations in the equilibrium range,"  United States -- Massachusetts: Tufts University, 1987, p. 98.
  • MLA:  Miaoulis, Ioannis Nikolaos. "Experimental Investigation of Turbulence Spectra of Charge Density Fluctuations in the Equilibrium Range." Ph.D. Tufts University, 1987.

Databases focused on dissertations and theses

The following sources focus primarily or exclusively on theses and dissertations; some provide direct access to full-text.

Sources indexing dissertations and theses

In the following subject-specific databases, the Advance Search option enables filtering by dissertation as the document type.

Print dissertation indexes and bibliographies

A number of indexes and bibliographies of dissertations have been published, primarily in print format.  These often focus on specific historical eras, geographic regions, or topics.