Discovering Invisible Scholarship of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs): A Critical Analysis

A Critical Analysis

Abstract

Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) are a relatively new mode of research and scholarly communication. ETDs contain the results of at least three years of scientific work, accomplished within a laboratory, a research team or an institute, university or school. These are considered the most invisible form of useful literature and the most useful from the literature. The invisible scholarship in ETDs refers to the valuable research and insights contained within these electronic documents that might not be readily accessible or visible to a broader audience due to various factors, such as limited indexing, restricted access, or lack of awareness. Therefore, it is important to highlight the scholarly impact created by ETDs over the period. This paper attempts to identify the growth and development of ETDs as cited references, growth of ETD repositories, national and international initiatives on ETDs and the role of open-access databases and scholarly search engines in the dissemination and accessibility of ETDs. It found that both Web of Science and Scopus index a good number of theses and dissertations as cited references in their documents. Over 3586 ETD repositories have been established worldwide and Global ETD Search, DiVA Academic Archive On-line, DART-Europe E-Theses Portal and Cybertesis are major international ETD repositories. Including India, 22 countries have active access to national-level ETD repositories. Open Access ETD databases such as OATD, EBSCO Open Dissertations and PQDT OPEN have covered a worthy number of theses and dissertations. Scholarly search engines, including Google Scholar, CORE: Connecting Repositories and BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) assist researchers in retrieving the details of theses and dissertations from the registered repositories.