Tagged / thesis

Open Access stories – BU theses

open access

This month we are highlighting the impact of open theses.

EThOS is the British Library’s collection of theses from UK universities, most of which are Open Access. All of BU theses are now available on EThOs. This generates additional impact for BU doctoral researchers that can see their theses being downloaded by people around the world.

Our statistics tell us that BU theses have been downloaded 1579 times from EThOS since September 2018.

However, that’s not the whole picture because many people might download a thesis directly from BURO, rather than EThOS. Data from BURO reveals that there have been a staggering 156205 downloads from the same period, with the most popular thesis being The use of social media and its impacts on consumer behaviour: the context of holiday travel with 20564 downloads!.

This just demonstrates the value of open knowledge and its impact.

For any questions about BURO or Open Access please contact BURO@bournemouth.ac.uk or your faculty library team.

José

HSS Faculty Librarian

EThOS – Find out more about the British Library’s free online thesis service

Training

The British Library are hosting their first EThOS webinar:

Using doctoral theses in your research: a guide to EThOS

EThOS is the national database for PhD theses, managed by the British Library. It’s a fantastic resource for researchers, with over 100,000 UK theses freely available to download and use for your own research, and another 200,000 available to search and scan on demand.

Join the free webinar to learn how EThOS works. Find out how to search for and download theses, and what to do if a thesis isn’t available. If you’re a PhD student, find out what will happen to your thesis once it’s completed. They will also explain how EThOS works with UK universities to support the whole research cycle, making the theses more visible and available for new researchers to use and build on.

This webinar is aimed at researchers, students, librarians and anyone who is interested in finding and using PhD theses.

Webinar on 10 December 2013, 11.00am GMT

Register at https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5131544266794515713

For BU-specific advice on accessing theses and for accessing other sources of theses information such as the Proquest Dissertations and Theses database, which provides access to global theses information, use the Locating Theses Researcher Guide on the Researcher Library Web Pages.

Contact your Library Subject Team for more help and advice around accessing theses.

Thoughts on writing recommendations for a research thesis

Guidance, PG research

Prof Edwin van Teijlingen (HSC) examined a PhD candidate last year whose recommendations were only Prof Edwin van Teijlingenvaguely related to the work presented in the thesis. Since then he has examined several PhD theses which had an interesting range of recommendations not directly related to the student’s study findings. Listed below are his ideas about ‘appropriate’ recommendations:

Many postgraduate students make recommendations that are too broad, too generic, or not directly related to the exact topic of their research. These recommendations are not wrong; they are simply not specific / relevant enough. Examiners like to see some more mundane recommendations that come specifically from the thesis / research work.

First, you should not really recommend anything that you have not previously discussed in the Discussion. The rule ‘no new material’ in your Conclusion is also applicable to your ‘Recommendations’.University of Olomouc thesis from 1713 with motif of Ottoman Wars

Secondly, recommendations are not the same as conclusions. Consider recommendations go one step further than conculsions as (a) ‘something’; (b) ‘someone’; and (c) ‘needs to do’.

Furthermore, there may be different levels within your set of Recommendations, with recommendations for (a) academic (i.e. more research is needed into…), (b) for policy-makers (e.g. data protection act needs to change to accommodate…); for (c) practitioners (e.e. managers in local government need to consider the mental well-bing of their staff); or recommendation for (d) training / education (e.g. health promotion officers employed in inner-city Birmingham need to be trained in being culturally sensitive to several large ethnic minority communities to help them fulfil their role better in the community).

We’re interested to know your thoughts on this and to hear your experiences of advising postgraduate students when writing their recommendations. Let us know what you think by adding a comment.