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:

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.

 

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2 Responses to I cannot find chemistry e-theses in UK Universities

  1. Mat Todd says:

    We have 105 hits for “chemistry” in theses available online via our library at Sydney.
    http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/35/simple-search?query=chemistry
    They’re PDFs, though…
    Mat

  2. Panayiota Polydoratou says:

    Hello,
    Are you familiar with the Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOSnet) project (http://www.ethos.ac.uk/)?
    Panayiota

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