NISO Member News
ANN ARBOR, MI, January 8, 2021
A new electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) dashboard can help administrators and librarians gather valuable data on their university’s research output – and it’s now available free to all universities who disseminate their dissertations and theses with ProQuest.
Developed in collaboration with librarians and graduate school administrators, the ETD Dashboard offers a visual summary of data generated from the usage and retrieval of dissertations and theses from the ProQuest® platform.
“We have found the data helpful in communicating with our graduate programs and alumni about the visibility their research has received,” said Dr. Jan Allen, Associate Dean for Academic and Student Affairs at Cornell University Graduate School. “We are developing stories for our graduate student weekly newsletter with some of these data, featuring our alums and their work.”
“The ETD Dashboard data provides insights on and visualizations of the impact of student research that complements what can be discovered through research published in journals and monographs,” said Dr. David Daleke, Vice Provost for Graduate Education and Health Sciences at Indiana University. “I think it will be helpful to see how research, especially what is yet not published in articles or monographs, is being received by the scholarly world.”
The dashboard lets institutions view their dissertation and theses retrieval trends by subject, author, country, university and more. They can also benchmark this data against other university groups. Retrieval and usage data is gathered from the 4 million researchers from 3,100 institutions that subscribe to the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global® database across more than 100 countries.
“I was pleased to see the data on historical retrieval trends – the usage increases we’ve seen since we began submitting full-text works has been surprising and informative,” said Martin Wolf, Head of Open Research at the University of Liverpool. “It will assist us in tracking our overall research reach."
“The ETD Dashboard was designed for institutions looking to monitor, grow and showcase the global impact of their graduate research,” said Dr. April Ellsey, Product Manager Lead at ProQuest. “Administrators and librarians can use this dashboard to get insights that lead to data-driven decisions about their institution’s research strengths, promotion opportunities, and performance against goals.”
Librarians and graduate-school administrators can use the ETD Dashboard data to:
- Support grant-writing efforts and investment decisions
- Market university standings to support student and faculty recruitment efforts
- Promote the most frequently accessed dissertation titles and subject areas
- Track retrieval data against other universities in Carnegie Tiers, Times Higher Education World University Rankings or a custom group of peer institutions
Learn more about the new ETD Dashboard and the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses dissemination program.
About This Organization
About ProQuest (about.proquest.com)
ProQuest supports the important work in the world’s research and learning communities. The company curates six centuries of content – the world’s largest collection of journals, ebooks, primary sources, dissertations, news, and video – and builds powerful workflow solutions to help libraries acquire and grow collections that inspire extraordinary outcomes. ProQuest products and services are used in academic, K-12, public, corporate and government libraries in 150 countries.
Along with its companies and affiliates Ex Libris, Alexander Street, and Bowker, ProQuest helps its customers achieve better research, better learning and better insights. For more information, visit our ProQuest and Extraordinary Stories blogs, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.