Frequently-used Sources
RIM: Research in Ministry Online RIM Online is an index that lists DMin and DMiss projects from reporting schools of theology accredited by the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada. Indexing began in 1981. Once you find a paper in RIM, you will need to access the content via TREN, Dissertation Express, or the DTL.
TREN: Theological Research Exchange Network TREN provides citations to 6,800 theological theses/dissertations and conference papers. Items can then be purchased through this site. The opening page actually states that they have 10,000 theses/dissertations, but the search page allows searching of 6,800 items.
Dissertation Express Online version of Dissertation Abstracts from UMI Proquest. Good for US theses. It’s free to search the database. To order a full-text PDF costs $38. Digital Dissertations is a subset comprising all dissertations in the Dissertation Abstracts database with a degree date of the current and previous year. It’s easier to search and browse and you also get 24 page previews before you buy.
EBSCO OpenDissertations Search thousands of open access dissertations.
PQDT Open Proquest Dissertations & Theses open access. Increasingly, authors are choosing to publish their work in Proquest’s Open Access program, so search here for items available by download at no cost.
Dissertations via the DTL The Digital Theological Library provides full-text access to 20,000 open access dissertations. Search for any topic or title, then limit your results to Thesis/Dissertation in the left-hand Format section.
Dissertations in WorldCat On the Advanced Search screen for WorldCat, limit the Content to Thesis/Dissertation, then search for any title or topic. A generic search for ‘religion’ yields over 100,000 results. You will need to access the content via TREN, Dissertation Express, or the DTL.
Other Sources
Abes: Agence Bibliographique de l’Enseignement Superieur (from France)
Australian Digital Theses Program
Center for Research Libraries foreign dissertations
Cybertesis.net University of Chile, provides access to 27,000 e-theses from 35 world universities
DART-Europe E-theses Portal (DEEP) European Working Group of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD). Access to 106,000 doctoral theses.
Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology This is an international database of citations for dissertations in musicology that contains over 12,000 records. Dissertations are from approximately 1950 to the present.
Digital Library and Archives Digital Library and Archives allows searching for citations and abstracts of over 6,700 theses and dissertations. Free full-text access is provided for over 4,500 of these items.
Directory of Dissertations in Progress The Directory contains 3,804 dissertations in progress at 170 academic departments in Canada and the U.S. This is a citation database of dissertations in progress in the area of history.
Dissertation.com Dissertation.com has just a few hundred dissertations and theses in its collection, but the site allows free, full-text access to the first twenty-five pages of each item.
Electronic Theses and Dissertations (UVa)
EThOS (Full text of theses from the British Library. This is running in beta at the moment.)
Le Fichier central des theses (French dissertations in progress)
Index to Theses Subscription database
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) NDLTD provides access to citations from thousands of digital dissertations and theses that are in PDF format. A significant number of these resources are freely available in full-text and can be viewed online.
OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center
PhdData: The Universal Index of Dissertations in Progress PhdData has citations from several thousand dissertations in progress from various parts of the world.
Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
Rutgers Electronic Theses & Dissertations (RUetd)
Theses Canada Portal Theses Canada provides access to bibliographic citations for all the theses in the National Library of Canada Theses Collection. Access to full-text theses is available for all items published between January 1, 1998 to August 31, 2002.
Theses de l’Universite de Lyon 2
University of Miami Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Vidyanidhi: Digital Library and E-Scholarship Portal (from India)
WorldCat.org The advanced search screen allows you to limit by Content to Thesis/Dissertation.
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