thesis and dissertation psu

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Thesis and Dissertation Information

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The Graduate School, the University Libraries, and the graduate faculty of Penn State have established format standards that a thesis or dissertation must meet before receiving final approval as fulfillment of a graduate requirement. The Office of Theses and Dissertations is the unit of the Graduate School responsible for certifying that theses and dissertations have been prepared in accordance with these established regulations.

Every thesis and dissertation must be reviewed by the Office of Theses and Dissertations for format only and are not edited for spelling, grammar, or punctuation. Master's papers are not reviewed by the Office of Theses and Dissertations.

When a thesis or dissertation is submitted to the Office of Theses and Dissertations, it must meet the formatting and deadline requirements set forth in the Thesis and Dissertation Handbook . All doctoral dissertations and master's theses must be submitted electronically. For more information on electronic theses and dissertations (eTDs), visit the eTD website .

The following forms are available in Adobe PDF and accessible Microsoft Word (DOC) format. The Word documents are designed to be used specifically with screen reader technology.  Please use the PDF versions of these forms unless you require the use of screen reader technology.

You may need to download the latest version of  Adobe Acrobat reader  (free) to view and print the PDF documents.

Submission Requirements

• Thesis and Dissertation Handbook
• Thesis, Dissertation, Performance, and Oral Presentation Calendar
• Copying and Binding
• The Most Common Mistakes
• How To Submit a Doctoral Dissertation
• How To Submit a Master's Thesis
• Format Review Instructions
• Acknowledgement of Federal Funding
• Pay thesis fee ($10) or dissertation fee ($50)

Supporting Materials

• Survey of Earned Doctorates

Templates 

The templates for Thesis and Dissertations are available in OneDrive . Please use the "Download" option from this page to download the required template(s) to use as your local working document.  There is no need to open the file in your browser or request any additional access to the files.

The Statistical Consulting Center gives advice to graduate students working on thesis research. The Graduate Writing Center  provides consultation to graduate students in all disciplines.

Information about using LaTeX is available from the University Libraries .

Information about the Graduate School's commencement ceremony .

Questions about theses, dissertations, or Graduate School commencement should be directed to:

Office of Theses and Dissertations 115 Kern Graduate Building University Park, PA 16802 Phone: 814-865-1795

Are you a student that needs to submit their work?

Want to explore published submissions.

Dissertation Resources

Carefully review the requirements of Penn State University, as well as the copyright restrictions on any images before digitally publishing your dissertation.

Penn State University Graduate School, Thesis and Dissertation Information

Penn State University Libraries / Library Guides / Copyright and Your Thesis or Dissertation This guide answers common copyright questions related to theses and dissertations, including reusing your own and others’ content. Written by Ana Enriquez, Scholarly Copyright Officer and Head, Office of Scholarly Communications and Copyright: [email protected]

A Graduate Student’s Guide to Copyright: Open Access, Fair Use, and Permissions , by Jessie Mannisto, 2011

Copyright and Your Dissertation or Thesis: Ownership, Fair Use, and Your Rights and Responsibilities This PDF guide was prepared by Kenneth Crews with the support of ProQuest. It is “principally intended to help readers learn and understand the copyright issues relevant to doctoral dissertations.”

ProQuest Guide: Copyright and Your Dissertation or Thesis This short PDF guide from ProQuest contains excerpts from Kenneth Crews’s “Copyright and Your Dissertation of Thesis.” It also includes a sample permission letter.

Graduate School

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) Frequently Asked Questions

Is there any paper required for an ETD submission? Yes! There are paper forms that accompany the ETD process:

• The Thesis Signature Page (for master's students) and Dissertation Signature Page (for doctoral students) are used for your committee to formally approve the final, post-defense copy of your thesis/dissertation. 
• The ETD Access Form, for both master's and doctoral students, is used to grant the PSU Library the non-exclusive right to make your ETD available through our Digital Repository.

How will I know when I have completed format review and my ETD is approved? If your ETD is approved before your term of graduation ends, your Graduate School processor will send you an email. If your ETD is approved after your term of graduation ends and everything is ready for degree awarding, you may not be notified until your graduation has been processed. Either way, you should be regularly checking both your PSU email and the email address you entered in your ETD Administrator profile as we may contact you at either email address. If you are unclear about your format review status, please contact your processor directly for an update (see previous FAQ for contact information).

I have questions about formatting my ETD. Who should I contact? Please see our ETD Formatting Requirements Page for detailed information about our formatting requirements, as well as several example pages. (Note: do not use another person's thesis or dissertation as a formatting guide or sample as requirements change and you could be introducing errors into your document.) If you have questions that aren't answered on our Formatting Requirements page, please contact the Format Editor at  [email protected] .

I'm having difficulty applying the formatting to my document. Where can I get help? If you have questions about the formatting, please contact our office (see immediately previous FAQ). If you need help with formatting your document, we recommend that you search for YouTube videos and other online written or video tutorials, contact a computer lab on campus for technical help, or hire an outside editor. 

What do I need to know about Copyright? Thesis and dissertation students need to know about both their own rights as creators of unique works as well as how to not infringe on the copyright of others. The PSU Library provides a variety of resources about copyright and fair use . You should explore their site in detail and contact the library with any questions. 

Should I register the copyright in my ETD? Proquest offers a service in which they will register your copyright for you and deposit the required copies with the Copyright Office. The fee for this service is $75. Although registration is not required to preserve your copyright, most copyright specialists feel that it is advisable since registration offers certain legal benefits if someone infringes on your copyright and you wish to bring suit. Note that if you choose not to register your copyright through ProQuest, you can still register it on your own at a later date. Information on self-registering your copyright can be found at eCO: Electronic Copyright Office .

How does my department get a copy of my thesis/dissertation? The Graduate School does not provide a paper copy of your ETD for your department. If your department would like to receive a paper copy, those arrangements need to be made directly between you and your department. Of course, once your ETD has been published by ProQuest, your department can access a full text PDF of your ETD through the PSU Library's subscription to the Dissertations & Theses database. A copy will also be available through PSU's Digital Repository, PDXScholar . If you have questions about what it means to have your work in PDXScholar, please contact Karen Bjork in the PSU Library at [email protected]. 

Who should I contact if I'm having problems with the ProQuest ETD Administrator site? Technical Support for the ProQuest ETD Administrator is available on the ETD Administrator website . Our staff and students have had uniformly positive results from their tech support team. 

Why do I have to pay $95 to ProQuest for Open Access Service? The ProQuest Traditional Publishing option allows for the payment of royalties, both to you as the author and to ProQuest. No royalties are paid for open access, so the additional fee is to offset ProQuest's administrative costs for providing open access. Your ETD will be open access in PDXScholar and discoverable by web search engines.

What is a Creative Commons license? A Creative Commons license provides a standardized way for you to communicate to the public how others can share and use your work. If you choose to add a Creative Commons license to your ETD, add the appropriate text and image to the Copyright Notice Page, double spaced below the copyright notice. For more information, visit the Creative Commons website .

If you would like to suggest an FAQ for inclusion on this page, feel free to email the question to us at [email protected] .

Penn State University Libraries

Dissertations and theses.

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Dissertations and Theses from Other Institutions

• Dissertations & Theses This link opens in a new window Citations and abstracts for doctoral dissertations and some theses from American and Canadian universities, and some international universities. Electronic full text of some works is available. If full text is not available, request a copy through interlibrary loan. more... less... ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global is the most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses in the world, with more than 2.5 million available in full text PDF.
• Dissertations and Theses @ CIC full-text This link opens in a new window Full text of dissertations and theses from CIC member universities are available to Penn State users. more... less... Full-text access to dissertations and theses written by graduates of CIC institutions are available.
• LionSearch This link opens in a new window an integrated search of books, e-books, research articles, newspaper articles, and other publications.
• Google Scholar This link opens in a new window A good tool if you have the title of a specific dissertation. Google Scholar will provide a link to the full text if the work is open access (freely available online). more... less... Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Once you set your institutional preferences, links to full-text, if available at Penn State, should appear.
• Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) This link opens in a new window Links to repositories of open access theses and dissertations from around the world, organized by country. more... less... The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations Union Catalog will serve as a repository of rich graduate educational material contributed by a number of member institutions worldwide. The hope is that this project will increase the availability of student research for scholars, empower students to convey a richer message through the use of multimedia and hypermedia technologies and advance digital library technology worldwide.
• EBSCO Open Dissertations This link opens in a new window A free database that includes more than 172,000 theses and dissertations from 1902 to the present and a link to full text when available. Previously called "American Doctoral Dissertations". more... less... Ebsco Open Dissertations (previously “American Doctoral Dissertations”), is an open-access database built to assist researchers in locating both historic and contemporary dissertations and theses. Created with the generous support of the H.W. Wilson Foundation and the Congregational Library & Archives in Boston, it incorporates EBSCO’s previously released American Doctoral Dissertations, and features additional dissertation metadata contributed by select colleges and universities from around the world. Providing researchers with citations to graduate research across a span of time, from the early 20th century to the present, this database will continue to grow through regular updates and new partnerships with graduate degree-granting institutions.
• Center for Research Libraries Catalog This link opens in a new window Search the online catalog for dissertations from around the world by keyword, author, title or subject, and limit by country. more... less... The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is a consortium of North American universities, colleges, and independent research libraries. The consortium acquires and preserves newspapers, journals, documents, archives, and other traditional and digital resources for research and teaching and makes them available to member institutions through interlibrary loan and electronic delivery.
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• Last Updated: Dec 11, 2023 9:55 AM
• URL: https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/dissertations

UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this community https://hdl.handle.net/2152/4

This collection contains University of Texas at Austin electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). The collection includes ETDs primarily from 2001 to the present. Some pre-2001 theses and dissertations have been digitized and added to this collection, but those are uncommon. The library catalog is the most comprehensive list of UT Austin theses and dissertations.

Since 2010, the Office of Graduate Studies at UT Austin has required all theses and dissertations to be made publicly available in Texas ScholarWorks; however, authors are able to request an embargo of up to seven years. Embargoed ETDs will not show up in this collection. Most of the ETDs in this collection are freely accessible to all users, but some pre-2010 works require a current UT EID at point of use. Please see the FAQs for more information. If you have a question about the availability of a specific ETD, please contact [email protected].

Some items in this collection may contain offensive images or text. The University of Texas Libraries is committed to maintaining an accurate and authentic scholarly and historic record. An authentic record is essential for understanding our past and informing the present. In order to preserve the authenticity of the historical record we will not honor requests to redact content, correct errors, or otherwise remove content, except in cases where there are legal concerns (e.g. potential copyright infringement, inclusion of HIPAA/FERPA protected information or Social Security Numbers) or evidence of a clear and imminent threat to personal safety or well-being.

This policy is in keeping with the  American Library Association code of ethics  to resist efforts to censor library resources, and the  Society of American Archivists code of ethics  that states "archivists may not willfully alter, manipulate, or destroy data or records to conceal facts or distort evidence." Please see UT Libraries'  Statement on Harmful Language and Content  for more information.

Authors of these ETDs have retained their copyright while granting the University of Texas Libraries the non-exclusive right to reproduce and distribute their works.

Collections in this Community

• UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations   30995