Help
General
The DART-Europe E-theses Portal is a searchable database of electronic research theses held in European repositories. The theses listed are open access - publicly available, in full, without charge. The DART-Europe Portal does not store theses, but we aim to provide a link to at least one electronic copy of every thesis listed in our database.
DART-Europe holds as much information as possible about each thesis, but this can vary, depending on the source of the information. As a minimum, details of the author, title and date of award are held. Many providers supply additional searchable information, such as abstracts and keywords.
Search
To undertake a keyword search, click on the 'Search' link, found on the Portal navigation bar, or use the search box located in the left column. Enter keywords in the search box and click 'Search'. All fields in the DART-Europe database are searched.
Search Techniques
- Use * as a wildcard to match any sequence of characters: e.g. comput* would match computer, computing, computerised, computational, etc.
- Search terms are linked with 'AND' by default.
- Use OR to broaden your search, e.g. Sweden OR Sverige.
- NOT may be used to exclude a word from your search results, e.g. nebula* not andromeda
- Use quotes to search for exact phrases, e.g. "genetic algorithm"
- Parentheses may be used to create more complex queries, e.g. (Sweden or Sverige) and economics
Accented Characters:
To help searchers, the DART-Europe Portal makes accented characters searchable as if they were unaccented, and vice-versa. For example, searching for either
Mexico or
México
should produce exactly the same number of hits.
Non-Western scripts:
Thesis details in non-Western character sets are not transliterated by DART-Europe, but they are retrievable through searches in those character sets. Where accompanying transliterations / translations are provided to DART-Europe, both Western and non-Western versions are made searchable.
Browse
This feature allows you to browse records harvested by DART-Europe by author, year of award, collection, awarding institution (where known) or country. Select an index to browse and follow the links to the theses which interest you.
Search History
The DART-Europe Portal stores your search history, allowing you quick access to the results of previous searching and browsing. You can view these through the Search History tab. The search history is available for the duration of your session. It will be removed after 20 minutes of search inactivity.
Results
DART-Europe results are shown by default in a brief summary format, which gives basic information about each thesis: the author and title, the date of award, the awarding institution, and the DART-Europe data source.
To progress to the full DART-Europe record for any thesis, and to access a copy of the thesis, click the title. The full display shows all the details collected about the thesis by DART-Europe, in exactly the format in which they were received. Clickable links to publicly accessible copies of the thesis will appear in this display.
Marked List
As you search the Portal, you may mark records which are of interest and add them to a list. To mark records from a results list, use the checkbox in the left-hand column. From a full record, use the 'Save this record' tab.
To access your list, use the 'Marked List' link in the website's main navigation. From here you may send a copy of the list to a specified email address in a choice of brief or full formats.
Note that your marked list is only accessible for the duration of your search session. It will be removed after a period of 20 minutes of search inactivity.
Terminology
Author
The name of the author of the thesis.
Country
Country of University (see below).
Collection
A collection is a repository, group of repositories or service provider from which DART-Europe collects records. Each collection may hold data about theses awarded by many institutions, sometimes from several countries.
Language
The language of the thesis. Often, the language of the thesis is not specified in the records provided to DART-Europe. Where it is specified, it is listed here.
Subject
Keywords, where available. Allocated by source repositories. Not always present in DART-Europe's records.
University
The name of the University which awarded a thesis. This information is not always present in the records provided to DART-Europe. Where we know the name of an awarding institution, it is listed here.
Year
The year of award.