E-Theses Online Service (EThOS) was a

bibliographic database A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records. This is an organised online collection of references to published written works like academic journal, journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government an ...

and union catalogue of electronic theses provided by the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit li ...

, the National Library 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 Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

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

higher education Tertiary education (higher education, or post-secondary education) is the educational level following the completion of secondary education. The World Bank defines tertiary education as including universities, colleges, and vocational schools ...

institutions, with around 3,000 new thesis records added every monthAnon (2014). until the British Library cyberattack forced the service to be temporarily taken offline.

EThOS services

EThOS records thesis data and metadata 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, sponsor, cross links to other databases and the full text of the thesis itself. the EThOS website gives open access to the full text 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 of the awarding body. Since 2015, EThOS has integrated authority control and other unique identifiers including: * The author's ORCID identifier.. * The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI). * The Handle System. * Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Some thesis records include the name of the doctoral advisor. Doctoral advisor metadata can be used in academic genealogies like academictree.org, Wikidata and the Mathematics Genealogy Project. 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 f ...

surname In many societies, a surname, family name, or last name is the mostly hereditary portion of one's personal name that indicates one's family. It is typically combined with a given name to form the full name of a person, although several give ...

, thesis title, doctoral advisor and various other metadata. Data in EThOS can also be accessed programmatically (by machines) using the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH) from the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), DataCite and its Application Programming Interface (API).