Dissertation: PhD
Thesis: masters
Many institutions are now providing online access to their theses and dissertations. Usually, you will find a link on a library website. Such collections are part of any institution's repository. UKZNs repository is called Research Space. See box below for more information.
Unfortunately, there is no inclusive international index to theses, but various collections are available that index and / or provide full or partial text access apart from individual institutions.
South African theses/dissertations index with full-text links: SABINET provides several collections.
The largest collection is UCTD: Union Catalogue of Theses and Dissertations. Once at Sabinet, from the drop-down menu under the Product option, scroll almost to the bottom of the list to the category SACat Plus and click on UCTD. There are smaller collections as well: Current and Completed Research and Navtech for Technikon documents.
International theses/dissertations
The Proquest Dissertations and Theses Global boasts "offering millions of works from thousands of universities. Each year hundreds of thousands of works are added. Full-text coverage spans from 1743 to the present, with citation coverage dating back to 1637". Not all theses are full text, some only provide a 24 page preview. Some South African institutions are now adding their theses to Proquest. This database is subscribed to by UKZN.
Other
Open Access theses and Dissertations (OATD) oatd.org indexes more than 7 million theses from over 1100 institutions worldwide.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations NDLTD. NDLTD provides information and a search engine for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), whether they are open access or not.
Research Space is UKZN's institutional repository where copies of masters and PhD theses and research articles are uploaded and available for public access.
All UKZN theses are listed in the UKZN library catalogue with clickable links to those that are full text. The catalogue can be searched by author, title, keyword. There is also a separate option to search just for Research Space items - the button is located on the red toolbar on the homepage.
On the black toolbar under the category 'Open scholarship' there is also a link to Research Space. Using this option takes you to the Research Space home page where you can search for theses by college, school, discipline and type of thesis.
Click here to access the Research Space libguide which includes information on open access; the SDGs, open data and ORCID and submissions guides for Research Space.