E-Theses Online Service


E-Theses Online Service is a bibliographic database and union catalogue of electronic theses provided by the British Library, the National Library of the United Kingdom. EThOS provides access to approximately 480,000 doctoral theses awarded by over 140 UK higher education institutions, with around 3000 new thesis records added every month.

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, for example Brian Cox and Elizabeth Blackburn's PhD theses. 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, for example the full text of David Beerling and Yadvinder Malhi's 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, for example the full text of John Sulston's PhD thesis is available by following links in EThOS to the Apollo repository of the University of Cambridge. Since 2015, EThOS has integrated authority control and other unique identifiers including:
Some thesis records include the name of the doctoral advisor, for example:
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.

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

Types of thesis included

As well as indexing Doctor of Philosophy theses, EThOS holds records of other kinds of doctorates including:
Master's degree theses such as Master of Philosophy, Master of Research, Master of Science and Master of Arts theses are not indexed by EThoS. Honorary degrees are also not included as there is usually no actual written thesis.

Development and contact

EThOS was developed in partnership with Higher Education Institutions around the UK with funding from Research Libraries UK and Jisc and was launched in January 2009. EThOS staff at the British Library can be contacted during office hours on email, Twitter and in person at the British Library.