This will be of particular relevance to any University of Cambridge student or researcher planning to include unpublished theses and dissertations in their systematic reviews. NHS staff should note that other than EThOS, the listed resources all require University of Cambridge logins, so will not be available to them.

Cambridge University Libraries & Archives now provides the ProQuest Theses & Dissertations Global service (PQDT Global). This is the world’s most comprehensive database of theses in all subjects.

You can download theses directly from PQDT Global. 

PQDT Global adds more than 300,000 new full text dissertations each year and has metadata from 1637-current and full text from 1997-current, with select older titles. This research contains valuable perspectives that contribute to the advancement of knowledge across many disciplines, playing an essential role in systematic reviews and providing insights into emerging research not yet published in other scholarly sources.

PQDT Global includes Citations Connections which uses the extracted citations from millions of full text theses published after 2008, to generate connections across academic sources targeted to a specific topic, saving researchers hours of time. Made up of Foundational Research and Similar Dissertations, researchers are given the ability to identify foundational scholarly contributions that are essential to building deep understanding of their field.

EThOS, the British Library’s Online theses service, is now back and restored after the long hiatus of loss of service caused by the BL cyber-attack in 2023. 

EThOS is an open access discovery platform for UK doctoral theses.  It currently indexes over 650,000 theses from UK universities from the 1700s onwards.

In many of the records in EThOS you will find a button ‘Access thesis from university’. This links to the metadata record of the thesis in the university repository, where it may be possible to download the thesis, if the university has made it available.

The University’s Theses & Dissertations page of the Eresources LibGuide has been updated with these developments.

Links to PQDT Global and EThOS can be found in the Cambridge University Libraries & Archives A-Z and in the List of resources for searching theses online.

If you prefer to use the PQDT index in Web of Science (Advanced search), this index now connects to any full text version of a thesis in PQDT Global and a link to download. Similarly, theses & dissertations in PQDT Global can now be found from any generic ProQuest database search.