As Commencement 2015 gets closer, we thought it was time for an update on the JHU electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) program. We originally announced the program in June 2013, and we have been operational since September 1 of that year. Based on feedback from many graduate students, it has proven to be a popular program. If you will be submitting a thesis or dissertation in the next few months, please see our ETD guide for all the formatting requirements and submission procedure.
In case you have not been aware of the requirements, all doctoral dissertations and most masters theses are now submitted as PDF/a files to the library rather than as bound paper documents. We then make the research available to the public via JScholarship, the JHU institutional repository. Students have the option to withhold publication for up to four years via an embargo function. You can now view unembargoed dissertations and theses for all semesters between fall 2013 and fall 2014. We will be adding spring 2015 documents sometime in June. You can still find older theses and dissertations in the library catalog and in the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database.
If you are interested in early, hand-written JHU dissertations, take a look at our collection at the Internet Archive. Hopkins students produce a lot of research that is disseminated via theses and dissertations. In the nearly two years we have been receiving ETDs, we have approved over 850 dissertations and 325 theses! The numbers vary greatly by school, but Public Health is the clear winner (at least in size):
- 25% come from Public Health
- 20% each come from Arts & Sciences and Medicine
- 17% come from Engineering
- The remainder are split among the other schools and programs
Stay tuned to see if these numbers spark some healthy competition among the schools!