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.
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
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.
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: