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Applied Ocean Science: Dissertations & Theses

Library guide for resources in the multidisciplinary areas of Applied Ocean Science

Dissertations & Theses

If you are a graduate student, you will probably want to look at previous dissertations & theses to gain a sense of writing style, formatting, etc.  But they are also a great - and sometimes overlooked - source of research literature.  Here are our major sources for finding these documents: 

eScholarship: UC's repository for scholarly materials. 

  • Search eScholarship by topic, title words, advisor name etc., and use the filters on the left to limit to theses.  Full text is available from all UC campuses. 
  • Note: eScholarship does not offer a way to limit to just PhD or just Masters documents, so you will get both intermingled. See the section on ProQuest Dissertations & Theses below if you are specifically only looking for one or the other type of document.

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

  • This huge database lists dissertations and theses from many universities around the world.
  • For UC schools: full text is available as far back as the mid-1990s in some disciplines. 
  • Non-UC schools: Usually a 20-ish page preview is available. If you wish to get the full dissertation, use the Get It At UC link in Proquest to request it via Interlibrary Loan.  
  • To limit to only Masters or Doctoral dissertations, choose the Advanced Search (in the top left corner pulldown menu). An option to select "Manuscript type" will be near the middle of the page. 

Embargo... What's That?

Many recent dissertations will be “embargoed” until a time in the future, possibly months or a year away. This means you can see an abstract of the dissertation, but the full text will be unavailable until the embargo is over. This is a common practice with dissertations, commonly when there are additional publications forthcoming from this work.

Looking for More?

We have a whole guide on Dissertation sources. There are links there to specific databases that include theses in what they cover, as well as a number of aggregated open access sources.  There are also tips for finding dissertations from our print collections that are older than what's available full text online.

MAS Capstone Papers

Finding MAS Capstone Project Reports: Browse in eScholarship

These project papers are in eScholarship, UC’s public repository for scholarly works. However, they are not flagged as “Dissertations” so you do need to browse to find them.  Here’s the path:

  1. Go to escholarship.org/uc/sio
  2. Click either Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation or Climate Science & Policy.
  3. The Capstone papers will be the first item.  You can then browse through these. Unfortunately, doing a search of just this collection is not working correctly.