As this is our last blog post for Open Access week, we thought we’d write something that PhD students and their supervisors may find useful.  While writing your PhD, it’s often useful to take a look at how other people did it.

PhD theses written by students at Portsmouth

Similar to other universities, all PhD theses written by students at Portsmouth are made available online for anyone to download for free.  You can access PhD theses written by students (after 2012) at Portsmouth on the Portsmouth Research Portal.  These theses are available for anyone to download, including the general public. Only PhD theses that have passed the viva and have had the final amendments are included.  It also includes PhD level theses, such as Prof Docs.  We currently have around 800 PhD theses on the Research Portal.

You can download and read the full-text of each thesis.  You can also filter results to just look at PhDs written in your subject area or just PhDs supervised by your supervisor.  For example, these are the PhD theses from Psychology and these are the PhDs supervised by Professor Andy Thorpe.

PhD theses written by students from anywhere in the UK

Additionally you can use the British Library’s Ethos website to access full-text PhD theses from any UK university. Similar to the Portsmouth Research Portal, only PhD theses that have passed the viva and have had the final amendments are included on Ethos. It also includes PhD level theses, such as Prof Docs.

“EThOS has 540,865 UK thesis titles, wow! Of which over half are already in digital format – either born-digital or digitised from print. 300 pages per thesis x 280,000 theses = 84million pages of unique research. That makes us happy.” (British Library twitter feed).

 

If you would like more information, please contact libraryresearch@port.ac.uk.  You may also like to look at the Library’s Research Support website and follow us on Twitter.