Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)
All Purdue theses and dissertations are submitted electronically by students and their advisors through the Graduate School Thesis Office, and all doctoral dissertations since 1997 are available online in PDF format via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. Master's theses are currently not available online.
Linking to ETDs
You can link directly to an single dissertation by searching the Purdue University Library Catalog. All theses and dissertations since 1974 have been cataloged by the Libraries, and those that are available online will include a link that you can click on from the catalog. Theses and dissertations that are not online are available as a hardcopy. Newly submitted dissertations can take from several months up to a year to become available online.
ProQuest enables you to group dissertations by embedding your search criteria in a URL. For example, if you wanted to create a link to all ETDs that were advised by Dr. Phillip Pope at Purdue, you would use this link:
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?rqt=305&sq=SCH(Purdue+University)+AND+ AD(Pope,+Phillip)
Or if you would like a list of ETDs from Agricultural and Civil Engineering, you would use this link:
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?rqt=305&sq=SCH(Purdue+University)+AND+ SU(0539+or+0543)
In these examples, SCH is School, AD is Adviser, and SU is the Subject Code in the URL. You can replace these with your own criteria and build more complex searches using other fields, keywords, and boolean operators. For a list of searchable fields and examples, see the ProQuest Help.
Access Control
Only the first 24 pages of a thesis or dissertation are available online to non-Purdue patrons. On-campus users or Off-campus Purdue users can access the full-text versions by using our proxy server. To create a link that uses our proxy server, you need to add the prefix of our proxy server (http://www2.lib.purdue.edu:2048/login?url=) to your URL. For example, the above links would become:
and
Which link you use depends on your audience. Use the longer, proxy link if your audience is on-campus or off-campus Purdue users. If your audience is not from Purdue, use the shorter link.
