Increasing Discovery & Usage of ETD Research

With EBSCO Open Dissertations, institutions are offered an innovative approach to driving additional traffic to ETDs in institutional repositories. Our goal is to help make their students’ theses and dissertations as widely visible and cited as possible.

EBSCO Open Dissertations extends the work started in 2014, when EBSCO and the H.W. Wilson Foundation created American Doctoral Dissertations which contained indexing from the H.W. Wilson print publication, Doctoral Dissertations Accepted by American Universities, 1933-1955. In 2015, the H.W. Wilson Foundation agreed to support the expansion of the scope of the American Doctoral Dissertations database to include records for dissertations and theses from 1955 to the present.

How Does EBSCO Open Dissertations Work?

Libraries can add theses and dissertations to the database, making them freely available to researchers everywhere while increasing traffic to their institutional repository. ETD metadata is harvested via OAI and integrated into EBSCO’s platform, where pointers send traffic to the institution's IR.

EBSCO integrates this data into their current subscriber environments and makes the data available on the open web via opendissertations.org.