Business Dissertations-Revised Where can one acquire copies of business dissertations to review, just out of curiousity. Particulary accounting/finance subjects? For some reason this post didn't come through the first time.
As far as I know, there is no central archive that provides free access to dissertations from a wide range of U.S. schools. If you have a specific university in mind, I'd try their library's web site. See, for example, http://etda.libraries.psu.edu/ My second strategy would be to visit nearby libraries to browse their print collections. Interlibrary loan is also a possibility. The UMI dissertation database at http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/ provides the full text of virtually all recent North American dissertations, but they charge (ca. $35, I believe) for each one. You'd also need access to Dissertation Abtracts, their subscription database (most libraries have it), in order to order dissertations from UMI. In contrast, nearly all the university-based dissertation sites are free.
It doesn't matter. You have to be affiliated with a school and be granted access to their online databases. Because such things are priced by total number of people with access, it is usually restricted to current students. Even alumni are, normally, not permitted to search via a university's website. But if you're a student somewhere, you should be able to get full access to Proquest's Dissertation Abstracts, which is what you seek. An alternative is to go to a university library. They'll usually let you search onsite, even if not affiliated with the school. Getting the abstracts is only the beginning, of course. You then have to get the dissertations. You generally have two choices: purchase them from Proquest or borrow them through Interuniversity Library Loan. (Again, you might have to be affiliated with a school in order to do that.) I'm not sure if other libraries (like public libraries?) can do this.
Most public libraries in the Northeast will provide interlibrary loan services. I don't know about other parts of the U.S. Rich Douglas is right to point out that access to Dissertation Abstracts requires either (a) current student/faculty/staff status at a university or (b) actual presence in the university library. Most academic libraries will provide access to any walk-in user. I'd still recommend looking first at the dissertation databases provided by individual universities -- web sites such as http://etda.libraries.psu.edu/ (For each university, I'd go to their main web page and do a site search for "dissertations".) While relatively few universities (maybe 15%) provide their own dissertations online, this practice has become increasingly common in recent years. UMI will not hold their near-monopoly for much longer.
You can also try the links below although I believe that both require some kind of membership. http://www.crl.edu http://www.theses.com Jack
Rich that may very well be so, but to have access to electronic copies of business dissertations is not very hard. One can google their way through to land with quite a few... I am talking from experience. Not sure if this is illegal but if one can find and download stuff like this through search engines, I don't see a problem.
` A limited number of Australian Theses (Doctoral and Masters) have been posted online here - the full text, not just the abstract.
If I remember, Questia has a free trial offer and you can search and access full dissertations through them. http://www.questia.com/ Also, I found a a bunch using Google Scholar - http://scholar.google.com/
You're right, and I was just about to jump in and suggest it. May I add that if you include in your search terms ".doc" or ".pdf", you'll likely move relevant hits up to the top. Google will give you links to MS Word documents and Adobe Acrobat documents that are out there. I don't see any legal or ethical issues with downloading dissertations found this way--as long as they're used for private, non-commercial purposes like educational research. The advice about searching individual schools' websites for dissertation repositories is a good one, too.
Of course there is always the central repository: UMI/Proquest: http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/ Some colleges (Colorado State for one) have online access to many of the theis and dissertations.
One place you might want to try is Virginia Tech's thesis and dissertations database. I know they provide public access to several of their dissertation abstracts, and there are several available in accounting (that's my field as well). The address is http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/.
