(2 October 2017, Ann Arbor, MI) Following the indexing of millions of scholarly articles in Google Scholar in 2015, ProQuest and Google are expanding their collaboration by indexing almost half a million full text dissertations from the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global™ database (PQDT), the leading source of emerging research from the world’s great universities.
Google Scholar users can now seamlessly discover and access this set of full text dissertations in their libraries’ subscription collections. The user experience is improved and libraries benefit from increased usage for their content investment.
“Dissertations are excellent sources for finding emerging research and new voices,” said Allan Lu, Vice President Research Tools, Services and Platforms. “ProQuest has curated this content over decades and we’re continually looking for ways to simplify its discovery and access.”
Linking and access to the dissertations from Google Scholar is automatic and requires no intervention by the library. An authenticated ProQuest® dissertations user searching Google Scholar will be recognized by the ProQuest platform and connect to the full text in their library’s collection. Users who are not recognized are sent to a landing page where they can purchase the dissertation or access the first 24 pages at no charge. Dissertations that have been published using the ProQuest Open Access publishing model are available to all users for free.
Excellent sources of original research on specific topics, dissertations are a crucial form of scholarly communication. They are vehicles for testing and presenting new ideas and trends and often contain data and results of lab experiments, fieldwork, surveys, and statistics that journal articles don’t include. Dissertations also provide valuable context for learning about faculty, institutions, and fellow scholars. For the researcher, the deep coverage and extensive bibliographies included in dissertations uncover sources and ideas that might otherwise be missed. On the ProQuest platform, PQDT provides fast and seamless access to 2 million full-text works and 4.5 million abstracts – all cross-referenced to scholarly content across the library’s online content environment.
The announcement is here.
