I cannot find chemistry e-theses in UK Universities

Typed into Arcturus

In a previous post I mentioned that Imperial College had 22 Chemistry theses Openly visible. I thought I’d look to see what other UK universities had. Here’s a simple poll of 19 Russell Group universities (I omitted the LSE as probably not having chemistry). Please correct or enhance any errors.

In our JISC SPECTRa-T project we highlighted the value of chemistry e-theses and what could be extracted from them. Has anyone been listening?

I searched with “theses thesis chemistry imperial” in a popular search engine; analogously for other universities. In some universities it’s almost impossible to answer the simple question “please show me all your chemistry theses”. Sometimes you get all theses in all disciplines. Sometimes you get a mixture of theses and journal articles. I put a ++ where the question is answered simply. A + where you might get something. I’ll comment at the end:

• Imperial:
  http://eprints.imperial.ac.uk/handle/10044/1/1230 (22 theses) ++
• Cambridge: couldn’t find anything. Ultimately I found Joe Townsend’s thesis and I think that’s all there is.
• Oxford: spent a fair time finding my way to http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/search/basic which gave 275 hits but many are not theses. +
• UCL:
  http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/view/theses/UCL_=28University_College_London=29.html gives 594 but most are not chemistry +
• Nottingham: http://etheses.nottingham.ac.uk/view/subjects/QD.html (24 theses) ++
• Birmingham: couldn’t find anything.
• Bristol:
  http://www.bristol.ac.uk/is/locations/branches/chemlibrary/collections/thesis.html no obvious links to electronic theses
• Cardiff: couldn’t find anything.
• Edinburgh:
  http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/3013 (43 theses) + took a little while to find this.
• Glasgow:
  http://theses.gla.ac.uk/view/faculties/chem.html (63 theses) ++ Trivial to find.
• King’s College London: couldn’t find anything.
  
• Leeds: couldn’t find anything.
  
• Liverpool: couldn’t find anything.
  
• Manchester: “Doctoral theses of The University of Manchester are made available electronically from the British Library’s Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS). See http://ethos.bl.uk/  for more information about this service which is available free of charge to researchers.” This will not be trivial.
  
• Newcastle: couldn’t find anything.
• Queen’s University Belfast: couldn’t find anything.
• University of Sheffield: couldn’t find anything.
  
• University of Southampton: couldn’t find anything. http://www.southampton.ac.uk/library/subjects/education/thesesdissertations.html
  does not refer to e-theses.
  
• University of Warwick: couldn’t find anything. “Theses can only be requested and consulted in the Centre. A self-service copier is provided for copying from theses (provided that the author has not forbidden copying), but copy cards must be re-charged in the main Library.”

I provide a class-list in the style of Lewis Carroll’s Tangled Tale.

First-class honours:

• Glasgow
• Edinburgh
• Nottingham
• Imperial

Second-class honours

• UCL
• Oxford

Third-class honours

• Manchester

Only 4 out of 19 were able to answer my simple question. No wonder I cannot find chemistry by searching in Bingle – there isn’t any. I had thought of adapting Nick Day’s Pubcrawler to extract chemistry from theses. Now I know I needn’t bother.

I don’t know whether it’s better in other subjects – I suspect not. The UK university repositories are not capturing etheses in a significant amount or not exposing it or both.