Dissertations are a valuable source: advisors often refer students to them to see work done by recent graduates, they contain extensive bibliographies of sources, and they sometimes have new findings or techniques that have not yet been published in the journal literature.

Dissertations written by OU students can be found through:

• the library catalog ⇒ Discover Local (Catalog)
  • Search by author name or title.
  • There will be a link for full text access to doctoral dissertations (note: masters' theses are not available electronically).
  • Print copies can be checked out (generally shelved by author's last name in the Great Reading Room, with overflow into the nearby Decks).
• SHAREOK Repository
  • Joint repository of digital items for OU and OSU
  • Since 2014, OU dissertations have been deposited there so that they are freely available
  • Items can be found through a Google (or other search engine) search.
• ProQuest Dissertations & Theses database
  • Dissertations from U.S. institutions are mostly available full text from 1997 to the present
  • Since 2014, OU dissertations are no longer deposited in this database; instead they are deposited in the SHAREOK Repository.
• Use SHAREOK or a general search engine to find OU dissertations published 2014-present.

• A caveat, many universities, including OU, no longer submit the full text of their dissertations in this database, but now deposit their dissertations in an institutional repository (at OU, this is called SHAREOK).
• Dissertations are indexed from 1861 to the present, so even if full text is not available, you can get an abstract and information about the author, year, advisors, etc.
• If the dissertation is not available electronically, can order through interlibrary loan.
• Use a general search engine to find dissertations from the last couple of years from other universities.