sciencedirect thesis

How to search: ScienceDirect Expert Searching

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The Library can assist with a literature search, which is a systematic and comprehensive search for published, academic material on your specific subject/topic. How do you request one? Simply go to  Request a literature search .

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ScienceDirect

• ScienceDirect (all journal and book titles) This link opens in a new window Full text books and journals published by Elsevier.

ScienceDirect is a multidisciplinary database which

hosts authoritative, full-text scientific, technical and health publications.

It contains over 2,500 journals and more than 33,000 books

—over 13 million peer-reviewed publications (and growing).

Combining searches

When Search History is turned on, your searches  and their results are recorded in your search history, which appears below the  search form. You can combine up to five searches from your search  history at one time using the Boolean operators AND and OR.

Combining searches creates a new search which is then added to your search  history. There can be a maximum of 3,000 characters in a combined search.

To combine searches from your search history        

• In Search History, select the check boxes associated  with the searches you want to combine.
• Select the appropriate Combine with link  to run the combined search:

 Example    If you have selected the following searches in search history:

(Chromosome clon!) [All Sources(Agricultural and Biological Sciences)]

(Gene splic!)[All Sources(Medicine and Dentistry)]

•Selecting Combine with AND  retrieves documents that include both "gene" with a form of the word "splice" and "chromosome" with a form of the word "clone" that were subject-classified as either Agricultural and Biological Sciences or Medicine and Dentistry, eliminating any documents that contain only one of the phrases.

•Selecting Combine with OR retrieves documents that include either "gene" with a form of the word "splice" or "chromosome" with a form of the word "clone" that were subject-classified as either Agricultural and Biological Sciences or Medicine and Dentistry

Using the Expert Search function in ScienceDirect

Expert search

With the Expert search forms, you can create more complex, sophisticated searches to search all sources , journals ,   books or Reference Works . Expert search is available by first selecting the Advanced search link next to the quick search option and then selecting  Expert search .  

Use Expert search to:

• Build searches using Boolean  syntax , proximity operators , and   wildcards
• Search multiple fields at the same time
• Prioritize   your search terms
• document type

Connectors and proximity operators - Expert search

You can use connectors and proximity operators to specify the words you want to include or exclude  from your search results and to search for more than one word in a single  search. If you use more than one connector or operator in your search , ScienceDirect® interprets the search according to the order of precedence .

To search for a specific phrase, enclose the terms in double quotes ("  ") or, for an exact match, brackets ({}). See Searching   for Phrases for more information.

AND is the default connector. When you enter 2 or more search terms,  AND is automatically inserted between any spaces or hyphens in the terms.

Use OR when at least one of your search terms must appear  in returned documents. You can use OR to search for synonyms, alternate  spellings, or abbreviations.

Use AND NOT to exclude specific terms from returned documents.

Use W/ n to specify  how far apart terms may appear in documents. W   represents "within", and n represents  the maximum number of words between the terms.

Use the following guidelines when choosing a number for n :

• To find terms in the same phrase, use W/3, W/4, or  W/5.
• To find terms in the same sentence, use W/15.
• To find terms in the same paragraph, use W/50.

Use PRE/ n to find documents in which the  first term precedes the second term within a specified number ( n ) of words.

Prioritizing search terms - Expert search

When you use more than one   connector or proximity operator   in a search, the operators are processed in a specific order. Understanding the "order of precedence" and following   connector guidelines   can help you create a more targeted search.

Order of Precedence

• W/ n ,   PRE/ n

Connector Guidelines

The following guidelines also apply to connectors:

• If you use two or more of the same connector, they are processed from left to right.
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• Last Updated: May 6, 2024 6:08 AM
• URL: https://libguides.unisa.ac.za/howtosearch

Open Access Theses and Dissertations

Thursday, April 18, 8:20am (EDT): Searching is temporarily offline. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to bring searching back up as quickly as possible.

Advanced research and scholarship. Theses and dissertations, free to find, free to use.

Advanced search options

Browse by author name (“Author name starts with…”).

Find ETDs with:

Written in any language English Portuguese French German Spanish Swedish Lithuanian Dutch Italian Chinese Finnish Greek Published in any country US or Canada Argentina Australia Austria Belgium Bolivia Brazil Canada Chile China Colombia Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Greece Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Ireland Italy Japan Latvia Lithuania Malaysia Mexico Netherlands New Zealand Norway Peru Portugal Russia Singapore South Africa South Korea Spain Sweden Switzerland Taiwan Thailand UK US Earliest date Latest date

Sorted by Relevance Author University Date

Only ETDs with Creative Commons licenses

Results per page: 30 60 100

October 3, 2022. OATD is dealing with a number of misbehaved crawlers and robots, and is currently taking some steps to minimize their impact on the system. This may require you to click through some security screen. Our apologies for any inconvenience.

Recent Additions

See all of this week’s new additions.

About OATD.org

OATD.org aims to be the best possible resource for finding open access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world. Metadata (information about the theses) comes from over 1100 colleges, universities, and research institutions . OATD currently indexes 7,241,108 theses and dissertations.

About OATD (our FAQ) .

Visual OATD.org

We’re happy to present several data visualizations to give an overall sense of the OATD.org collection by county of publication, language, and field of study.

You may also want to consult these sites to search for other theses:

• Google Scholar
• NDLTD , the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. NDLTD provides information and a search engine for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), whether they are open access or not.
• Proquest Theses and Dissertations (PQDT), a database of dissertations and theses, whether they were published electronically or in print, and mostly available for purchase. Access to PQDT may be limited; consult your local library for access information.

ScienceDirect LibGuide: Open Access

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Committed to Open Science

Elsevier is one of the fastest-growing open-access publishers in the world.

All articles published open access are peer-reviewed and freely available for everyone to read, download, and reuse, according to the user license displayed on the article.

• Nearly all our 2800+ journals enable open-access publishing, including 700 fully open-access journals, such as Cell Reports and The Lancet Global Health.
• See the full list of Open Access journals

• << Previous: Journals & Books
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• Last Updated: May 8, 2024 4:31 AM
• URL: https://elsevier.libguides.com/sciencedirect

Reference management. Clean and simple.

The top list of academic search engines

1. Google Scholar

4. science.gov, 5. semantic scholar, 6. baidu scholar, get the most out of academic search engines, frequently asked questions about academic search engines, related articles.

Academic search engines have become the number one resource to turn to in order to find research papers and other scholarly sources. While classic academic databases like Web of Science and Scopus are locked behind paywalls, Google Scholar and others can be accessed free of charge. In order to help you get your research done fast, we have compiled the top list of free academic search engines.

Google Scholar is the clear number one when it comes to academic search engines. It's the power of Google searches applied to research papers and patents. It not only lets you find research papers for all academic disciplines for free but also often provides links to full-text PDF files.

• Coverage: approx. 200 million articles
• Abstracts: only a snippet of the abstract is available
• Related articles: ✔
• References: ✔
• Cited by: ✔
• Links to full text: ✔
• Export formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver, RIS, BibTeX

BASE is hosted at Bielefeld University in Germany. That is also where its name stems from (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine).

• Coverage: approx. 136 million articles (contains duplicates)
• Abstracts: ✔
• Related articles: ✘
• References: ✘
• Cited by: ✘
• Export formats: RIS, BibTeX

CORE is an academic search engine dedicated to open-access research papers. For each search result, a link to the full-text PDF or full-text web page is provided.

• Coverage: approx. 136 million articles
• Links to full text: ✔ (all articles in CORE are open access)
• Export formats: BibTeX

Science.gov is a fantastic resource as it bundles and offers free access to search results from more than 15 U.S. federal agencies. There is no need anymore to query all those resources separately!

• Coverage: approx. 200 million articles and reports
• Links to full text: ✔ (available for some databases)
• Export formats: APA, MLA, RIS, BibTeX (available for some databases)

Semantic Scholar is the new kid on the block. Its mission is to provide more relevant and impactful search results using AI-powered algorithms that find hidden connections and links between research topics.

• Coverage: approx. 40 million articles
• Export formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, BibTeX

Although Baidu Scholar's interface is in Chinese, its index contains research papers in English as well as Chinese.

• Coverage: no detailed statistics available, approx. 100 million articles
• Abstracts: only snippets of the abstract are available
• Export formats: APA, MLA, RIS, BibTeX

RefSeek searches more than one billion documents from academic and organizational websites. Its clean interface makes it especially easy to use for students and new researchers.

• Coverage: no detailed statistics available, approx. 1 billion documents
• Abstracts: only snippets of the article are available
• Export formats: not available

Consider using a reference manager like Paperpile to save, organize, and cite your references. Paperpile integrates with Google Scholar and many popular databases, so you can save references and PDFs directly to your library using the Paperpile buttons:

Google Scholar is an academic search engine, and it is the clear number one when it comes to academic search engines. It's the power of Google searches applied to research papers and patents. It not only let's you find research papers for all academic disciplines for free, but also often provides links to full text PDF file.

Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature developed at the Allen Institute for AI. Sematic Scholar was publicly released in 2015 and uses advances in natural language processing to provide summaries for scholarly papers.

BASE , as its name suggest is an academic search engine. It is hosted at Bielefeld University in Germany and that's where it name stems from (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine).

CORE is an academic search engine dedicated to open access research papers. For each search result a link to the full text PDF or full text web page is provided.

Science.gov is a fantastic resource as it bundles and offers free access to search results from more than 15 U.S. federal agencies. There is no need any more to query all those resources separately!

ScienceDirect Support Center

To post social content, you must have a display name. The page will refresh upon submission. Any pending input will be lost.

How do I cite a ScienceDirect article?

An article citation is typically made up of the author(s), article title, publication title, date of publication, and page numbers (or article number). Consult the journal’s reference style for the exact appearance of the article citation elements, abbreviation of the journal name, and the use of punctuation.

General principles for citing articles

There are some general principles for citing articles:

• Regardless of reference style, always include the article number where the page number (or page range) would otherwise go.
• Never cite the internal page numbering starting at ‘1’.
• Include the DOI if known.

Citing articles which are not final

Articles which are not final (e.g., a journal pre-proof) or do not contain all the typical elements of an article citation can be cited using the year of online publication and the DOI, as follows: author(s), article title, publication (year), DOI. For more information on creating and citing DOI links, visit the DOI website .

• A.U. Thor, Title of article, Favorite Journal (2020), https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/doi-suffix, or
• A.U. Thor, Title of article, Favorite Journal, https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/doi-suffix.
• A.U. Thor, Title of article, Favorite Journal 5 (1) (2020) 37-65, https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/doi-suffix.
• A.U. Thor, Title of article, Favorite Journal 5 (1) (2020) 101357, https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/doi-suffix.

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Dissertations/Theses: MIT

• How to write a dissertation/thesis

Pages on this guide

Dissertations/Theses at MIT | Non-MIT | How to write

Related guide

• MIT Thesis FAQ View topics such as specifications, submitting to DSpace, copyright, holds, availability, and fees.

MIT doctoral dissertations and masters theses

• Paper and microfiche: Search the library catalog, Search Our Collections .
• DSpace does NOT contain the complete collection of MIT theses.
• Use Search Our Collections to search for all MIT theses.
• Theses are received one month after degrees are granted in February, June, and September.
• Additional information may be found at Thesis Access and Availability FAQ .
• Theses may not be borrowed from the Distinctive Collections Reading Room .
• PDF copies may be purchased through the Distinctive Collections Request System . See Requesting Materials for complete information.
• Theses may be viewed in person in the Distinctive Collections Reading Room .
• Institutions may purchase PDF copies through the Distinctive Collections Request System . See Requesting Materials for complete information.

View Online:

•   MIT theses in DSpace are available to anyone, for free, as printable full-text PDF files.

Order PDF Copies:

• For theses not in DSpace, PDF copies may be purchased through the  Distinctive Collections Request System . See  Requesting Materials  for complete information.
• See pricing information and contact Distinctive Collections with any questions. 

Prepare and Submit Your MIT Thesis:  

• How to write a dissertation or thesis
• Manage your references
• MIT Thesis FAQ
• Specifications for Thesis Preparation and Submission
• Add your thesis to DSpace: Electronic submission information

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Featured resource

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global

• The largest single repository of graduate dissertations and theses
• 3.8 million graduate works, with 1.7 million in full text
• Includes work by authors from more than 3,000 graduate schools and universities the world over, and covers every conceivable subject. 
• Next: Non-MIT >>
• Last Updated: Oct 19, 2022 7:33 AM
• URL: https://libguides.mit.edu/diss