All records of e-theses are stored in Pure – which is our CRIS (current research information system) – and viewable via the QUB Research Portal. All you need to do is go to the portal’s page and click on the ‘more options' icon; you will see the direct link to the QUB student theses there – all 2,698 of them (at the time of writing).

Obviously, the Queen’s Library holds many more theses. Those nearly 2,700 are mainly uploads from our most recent graduates. To no one’s surprise, it was Covid-19 that sped up the shift towards digital submissions, and from September 2021 it is mandatory for all PGR students to submit an electronic copy of their thesis to Pure. Hard copies are no longer required, so – with very few exceptions – if you are looking for a thesis produced within the last three years, you will not be able to check out a print copy.

There are, however, some older theses that are also available online. The Research Portal allows narrowing down search result according to the year of submission, as shown below:

The further back we go, the fewer digitised theses we have - but this is also a work in progress as we are steadily acquiring digitised copies of the older theses and uploading them into Pure. The recent cyber-attack on the British Library has slowed down this progress as we are temporarily devoid of their digitising services, but we have set up an in-house service offering thesis digitisation on request.

If you would like to know more about e-theses and/or other content available via the Research Portal, do let us know! After the successful series of training sessions delivered last term, we are planning to offer more session in the next academic year.

Contact us at e-thesis@qub.ac.uk