ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (PQDT) provides online full-text of over 600,000 doctoral dissertations and master's theses in digital format. PQDT may be the most authoritative resource for full-text information about doctoral dissertations and master's theses. Most titles published from 1997 forward are available as full-text PDF documents. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (PQDT) selectively cover master's theses and doctoral dissertations accepted at thousands of colleges and universities throughout the U.S. This database of over 2 million records also includes information about a some doctoral dissertations and master's theses from a few universities in Canada and Europe.

After locating a useful dissertation or thesis that is available in digital format, just click on the link marked Page Image - PDF and wait a moment or two for the book length document to load. These full-text PDF files require the free Adobe Acrobat Reader for displaying and printing. The older dissertations and theses that are not available in digital format can be acquired FREE via the UT Arlington Interlibrary Loan service.

ProQuest Digital Dissertations is available to current UT Arlington faculty and students on the web at this address:

http://eresource.uta.edu/cgi-bin/db-proquestdigitaldiss.cgi

The key truncation symbol in ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (PQDT) is the asterisk (*), and when this symbol is put at the end of a word, the database will be searched for all of the possible endings--suffixes--for that word. For example, the command "abus*" will have the computer search engine look for all possible endings of this word. It should find, "abuse," "abuser," and "abusing."

Two Boolean operators that are important in finding information are AND and OR. The AND is used to connect two different concepts and the OR is used between concepts that are synonymous. It is critical to put parentheses around a search expression that contains an OR. Here is an example:

(JUVEN* OR DELINQ* OR RUNAWAY*) AND (POLICY OR POLICIES)

The first part of this statement will find material about the juveniles, delinquency, and runaways. The second part will look for the words "policy" or "policies". The AND then links the first set with the second. This should be an effective way to find doctoral dissertations and master's theses that address policies for youthful offenders.

John Dillard, Social Sciences Librarian -- dillard@uta.edu
cell: (817) 675-8962 - - office: (817) 272-7518