Transportation Studies and Planning: Find Dissertations/Theses

Search by author: Change the drop-down to "author/creator"

Search by title: Change the drop-down to "in the title"

Search by subject or department: Change the drop-down to "in subject"; use the heading "theses" followed by the department:

• theses anthropology
• theses computer science
• theses pharmacology

Search by topic: Use the keywords search and combine the phrase "theses and" followed by a topical keyword(s):

• theses and salmon habitat
• theses and shakespeare
• theses and japan and history

Is the topic original?

Conduct a literature review to see if someone has already published about this topic.  Search UW Libraries Article & Research Databases,  Dissertations and Theses Fulltext, Google Scholar, and more.  See the Research tab of this guide for more suggestions.

Avoid Plagiarism

If you quote or summarize another author's words, provide attribution.  Always cite the original work using quotation marks and the appropriate citation style (APA, Chicago, MLA). 

Will you need to use another author(s) work(s)?

Including material (song lyrics, audio, video, etc.) by other authors is acceptable, but you must avoid copyright infringement.  ProQuest, the leader in providing access to your dissertations, warns that "Republishing someone else's work, even in abbreviated form, requires permission from the author or copyright owner."  For more details, see ProQuest's Copyright Guide. 

Also from ProQuest, "...Dr. Kenneth D. Crews, a Professor at Indiana University's School of Law, has kindly given us permission to provide free access to his booklet Copyright Law and Graduate Research: New Media, New Rights, and Your New Dissertation.  It provides a detailed overview of copyright law that no new dissertation author should miss."  For more info, see Submitting your dissertation or thesis to ProQuest.

Maintain control over your published works

Scholars who give their written work away by assigning copyright to publishers may lose some rights to use their own work, even in their own classrooms.  Higher education and governments spend billions of dollars a year to support scholarly research that their libraries then pay billions of dollars to buy back as published scholarship.

Be aware of your rights as an author and maintain your copyright.  Read more about scholarly publishing and open access issues at UW...

Here are some things that you can do, as Authors, to transform the structure of scholarly communication:

• Submit papers to quality journals that have reasonable pricing and copyright practices. 
  
• Negotiate journal publishing contracts to retain all or some of your rights such as:
• Distributing copies to classes
• Including your work in a course pack
• Sending reprints to colleagues
• Author/institution self-archiving; posting yoru work on your home page, in your institutional repository, or in a subject archive
• Review license possibilities such as the SPARC's License addendum or Creative Commons' licenses.

Your dissertation will be included in the ProQuest  Dissertations and Theses database so that others can find your work.  You may give permission for ProQuest to sell copies of your dissertation as well.  For more information, see ProQuest's Submitting your dissertation or thesis to ProQuest.

By the end of this academic year, theses and dissertations submitted at the University of Washington will be published online through Research Works, our digital repository.  You may ask that this be delayed for up to two years.