ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Database

5 Things You Need to Know About ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Full-Text

1. What’s in it?

2.4 million searchable citations to dissertation and theses from around the world from 1861 to the
present day.

1.2 million full text dissertations that are available for download in PDF format, for most of the
dissertations added since 1997. There are over 1,000,000 full text theses for years prior to 1997.

The oldest full-text U.S. dissertation in the database is M. Tullii Ciceronis pro a. cluentio habito oratio
ad judices written by Joesph A. Graves for a Ph.D. at Yale University in 1878. It is handwritten and is
about a speech given by Cicero.

2. If you have a student looking for Master’s Theses, you may be able to find a full-text Wayne State
University Master’s Thesis in ProQuest Dissertations. As of November 3, 2009, there were 480 full-
text Master’s Theses from Wayne State University available in the database. To find them, use the
Advanced Search. You can also add a search by Department to your search to narrow your results.

Select the

Then under the select

3. You can search by Advisor or Committee Member. However:

a. Committee Members is a new field added in 2007, and there are no plans by ProQuest to
add this field and accompanying metadata to older records.
b. Committee member information is not a required field when students submit the metadata
to ProQuest, so not every dissertation contains the committee members’ names in the
metadata.
c. If you need to find a committee member in older records, you can try a Document Text
search for the Committee Member’s name (in quotes, “first name last name”) AND Wayne
State University in the School name/code.
d. Since moving to electronic submission, PDFs in most cases do not include a replica of the
page containing the signatures of the Advisor and Committee Members.

4. You cannot e-mail the full-text PDF directly from the database. It will only send the citation
information and a link to the full text. ProQuest does include the proxy in the Document URL, so the
link to full text will work from on or off-campus.

5. You can sign up for WebEx online webinar training for this and other ProQuest products at:
http://www.proquest.com/en-US/support/training/default.shtml
Prepared by Veronica Bielat, Information Services, WSULS
11/10/2009
ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Database.doc