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Is there a way to search all openly published theses online?

Maybe there is a way for Google Scholar to ignore other types of articles?

I am aware of SCOPUS and Web of Knowledge, but unfortunately I do not have access to these services.

Edit: I talked to my librarian and we found a service called EThOS and additionally a service called openthesis. Openthesis requires people to upload submissions, which would cover nowhere near as many as Google has indexed. EthOS is for the UK only.

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    Why would you want to search ALL theses? It's kind of like saying, "Is there a way to search all magazines online?"
    – Irwin
    Commented Apr 9, 2013 at 0:19
  • @Irwin forgive me, I don't understand what you mean. I would like to limit to only theses. From my understanding Google Scholar indexes all types of articles, but I am looking to only search theses.
    – William
    Commented Apr 9, 2013 at 0:26
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    What sort of information are you looking for? If you want to learn something, I'm not sure why you would only want to learn it from a thesis (as opposed to journal papers covering the same material), and the same holds for finding out whether an idea is already known. If you are looking for a specific thesis, then that's a different question from searching through all theses. If what you are trying to find out is about theses specifically (e.g., what is the length of an average history thesis), then it's enough to have a representative sample rather than a complete list.
    – Anonymous Mathematician
    Commented Apr 9, 2013 at 0:51
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    So how did your university librarian answer this question? (You did ask your librarian, didn't you?)
    – JeffE
    Commented Apr 9, 2013 at 4:54
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    What @Irwin was hinting at was that you would probably want to narrow it by subject/field. If you are looking for a thesis in anthropology, you don't want a service/engine that will also peruse/return theses in molecular biology
    – Ben Norris
    Commented Apr 9, 2013 at 10:43

2 Answers 2

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The only thing I can think of given the lack of other details is this They claim to be "the world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses." While that is not "ALL", it certainly is "MOST"?

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Check to see the list of sites that are comprehensive: https://www.netvibes.com/ircnigeria#FREE_Virtual_Libraries

One of them, Global ETD Search http://search.ndltd.org/ as at today has 5,382,984 electronic theses and dissertations contained in the NDLTD archive

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