E-Theses Online Service (EThOS) is a

bibliographic database A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records, an organized digital collection of references to published literature, including journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, p ...

and

union catalog A union catalog is a combined library catalog describing the collections of a number of libraries. Union catalogs have been created in a range of media, including book format, microform, cards and more recently, networked electronic databases. Pr ...

ue of electronic

theses A thesis ( : theses), or dissertation (abbreviated diss.), is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings.International Standard ISO 7144: ...

provided by the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...

, the

National Library A national library is a library established by a government as a country's preeminent repository of information. Unlike public libraries, these rarely allow citizens to borrow books. Often, they include numerous rare, valuable, or significant wo ...

of the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

. EThOS provides access to over 500,000 doctoral theses awarded by over 140 UK

higher education Higher education is tertiary education leading to award of an academic degree. Higher education, also called post-secondary education, third-level or tertiary education, is an optional final stage of formal learning that occurs after completi ...

institutions, with around 3000 new thesis records added every month.Anon (2014).

EThOS services

Germaine Greer, 28 October 2013 (cropped)

EThOS records thesis data and

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

which can then be searched with basic and advanced search terms.

Data recorded in EThOS

Theses indexed by EThOS have a minimum of a thesis title, author, awarding body and date. Optional additional metadata may be included such as the thesis abstract,

doctoral advisor A doctoral advisor (also dissertation director, dissertation advisor; or doctoral supervisor) is a member of a university faculty whose role is to guide graduate students who are candidates for a doctorate, helping them select coursework, as well ...

, sponsor, cross links to other databases and the full text of the thesis itself. the EThOS website gives

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

to the

full text In text retrieval, full-text search refers to techniques for searching a single computer-stored document or a collection in a full-text database. Full-text search is distinguished from searches based on metadata or on parts of the original texts ...

of around 160,000 UK doctoral theses that have been digitised. Theses can be accessed by freely registering for then logging into EThOS. Open access is also provided by links to the

Institutional repository An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Academics also utilize their IRs for archiving published work ...

of the awarding body. Since 2015, EThOS has integrated

authority control In information science, authority control is a process that organizes information, for example in library catalogs, by using a single, distinct spelling of a name (heading) or a numeric identifier for each topic. The word ''authority'' in ''au ...

and other

unique identifier A unique identifier (UID) is an identifier that is guaranteed to be unique among all identifiers used for those objects and for a specific purpose. The concept was formalized early in the development of computer science and information systems ...

s including: * The author's

ORCID The ORCID (; Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication as well as ORCID's website and services to look up authors and their bibliographic ...

identifier.. * The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI). * The

Handle System The Handle System is the Corporation for National Research Initiatives's proprietary registry assigning persistent identifiers, or handles, to information resources, and for resolving "those handles into the information necessary to locate, acces ...

. * Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Some thesis records include the name of the

. Doctoral advisor metadata can be used in academic genealogies like academictree.org,

Wikidata Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, can use under the CC0 public domain license ...

and the

Mathematics Genealogy Project The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a web-based database for the academic genealogy of mathematicians.. By 31 December 2021, it contained information on 274,575 mathematical scientists who contributed to research-level mathematics. For a ty ...

. Academic genealogies in Wikidata are built using the doctoral advisor relation ( Property:P184).

Searching EThOS metadata

Where present, metadata can be used as search criteria. So for example, in addition to a basic search, an advanced search facility allows users to search for theses by publication year, awarding body, author's

given name A given name (also known as a forename or first name) is the part of a personal name quoted in that identifies a person, potentially with a middle name as well, and differentiates that person from the other members of a group (typically a fa ...

surname In some cultures, a surname, family name, or last name is the portion of one's personal name that indicates one's family, tribe or community. Practices vary by culture. The family name may be placed at either the start of a person's full name ...

, thesis title, doctoral advisor and various other metadata. Data in EThOS can also be accessed programmatically (by machines) using the

Protocol for Metadata Harvesting The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI-P ...

(PMH) from the

Open Archives Initiative The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was an informal organization, in the circle around the colleagues Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson and Simeon Warner, to develop and apply technical interoperability standards for archives t ...

(OAI), DataCite and its Application Programming Interface (API).