How do I find Dissertations and Theses?

This page provides resources for locating electronic dissertations and theses available in digital repositories. Also provided are instructions for locating theses and dissertations in our library catalog and in our bibliographic search tool OPPIE.

Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations - Use their Scirus ETD search tool to search through Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) collections across multiple institutions at once.  Search by multiple fields and limit by year(s) or subject.

Center for Research Libraries foreign dissertations – search more than 750,000 dissertations produced for universities outside of the United States and Canada.   Also offers browse by country and awarding institution.

Theses Canada - covers approximately 300,000 theses and dissertations on microform in Library and Archives Canada's collection. Of these approximately 50,000 are available electronically (downloadable for personal use) and paper copies are available via interlibrary loan.

ETHOS - A service from the British Library which gives access to a large number of UK PhD theses online (and where the thesis is not available online you can request for it to be digitized, often with no charge).

Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) Access to the research literature pre- and post-peer-review through author self-archiving in 100+ institutional e-print archives, worldwide. Indicates which repositories have fulltext.

If you need to obtain a thesis or dissertation from an institution, you can purchase an unbound copy from ProQuest's Dissertation Express using a credit card.  Orders are shipped directly to you.  Look up theses or dissertations by title, author, or UMI publication number.

For theses and dissertations supported by LANL, try our Library catalog.  Using a Basic or Advanced Search, enter the words from the title, author, or enter the report number. 
Thesis example (when title is known): Resolution enhancement of multilook imagery.

1. Enter thesis title in the library catalog search box using the filter “Title begins with…”
2. Click on Title
3. Click on “View Full Record"

The following databases index the term thesis and/or dissertation as a document type in records, which can be searched in the Subjects index:
Energy Citations Database (ECD): Thesis/Dissertation
Engineering Index (EIX): Dissertation
Inspec: Dissertation

Reference Desk: 667-5809
Email Us

MS-P362
PO Box 1663
Los Alamos, NM
87545-1362

Hours
Badgeholders: 24-7
Public: 9:00am-4:00pm (M-F)

Oppenheimer Study Center
TA-3, SM-207