LibGuides: Anthropology: Student's Practical Guide to Writing Papers: Dissertations and Theses

Dissertations and Theses

Dissertations are unpublished book-length manuscripts completed in order to earn a Ph.D. Masters Degree theses are generally shorter, focused and well-documented research papers. Both are often the most cutting-edge and focused work on their topics, so they are valuable as research sources, and also provide templates for students writing theses and dissertations.

A good starting point to writing a thesis is the Library's Research Guide on Writing Dissertations and Theses.

Various subject-based databases index and abstract dissertations and some theses that you can use as sources for your research and templates for your own theses. These include:

ProQuest Dissertations and Theses

The Dissertations and Theses database from ProQuest cites 2.3 million works issued by graduate institutions in North America and beyond from 1861 to the present. PDF full texts of most UC dissertations starting about 1997 are available online at no charge.

Center for Research Libraries

CRL is a good source for foreign dissertations; our CRL membership provides free loans for UCSD researchers.

Additional ETD Links

Use this UCSD LibGuide for more links to ETD (electronic theses and dissertations) repositories across the globe.

University of California ETDs

To limit to ETDs, click on the thesis box in the menu on the left. To limit to a particular campus, select the drop down option and the campus you want to search. To limit to MA Theses (rather than dissertations) in a particular field, put anthropology thesis into the search box in the upper right-hand corner and select "This Series," rather than "All of e-Scholarship."

There are also additional resources to find undergraduate theses:

UCSD Political Science Undergraduate Theses
Claremont Colleges Respository of Theses and Dissertations which are all pretty interdisciplinary and intercollegiate. They can be searched by subject -- select the group you want to search (for example Pomona senior theses and put in your keyword(s). Here's a note regarding various schools' specializations and tendencies:
- CMC - heavily political science, economics, govt
- Scripps - math, gender, women's studies
- HMC - STEM
- Pitzer - social justice
- Pomona - across the board
https://undergraduatecommons.com/ is the international aggregator of undergraduate research and you can filter by Type - here's the link for honors theses and capstone projects: https://undergraduatecommons.com/publication_type.html

Templates and Guides for Writing Theses and Dissertations

UCSD provides documentation for preparing graduate theses and dissertations which may help: Section III: Organization of Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses is probably most helpful, but this also provides very specific detail about specific sections (ie abstracts, acknowledgments, the use of images and statistics, etc.) -- rather than guidance on the overall structure of theses and dissertations.