Submitting Your Electronic Thesis or Dissertation (ETD)

This guide will answer:

• What role do the University Libraries play in ETDs?
• What is Digital Scholarship@UNLV and what is ProQuest?
• How do I upload my ETD to these platforms?
• What's an embargo and do I need one?

There are several folks involved in the ETD submission process!

• You are the most important person involved in this process. It's your responsibility to understand the deadlines and expectations for submitting your ETD.
• Your committee members and program advisors support and guide you through the research and writing process. They also help fulfill some graduation requirements (like passing a thesis or dissertation defense). However, this workshop doesn't focus too much on committee members.
• The Graduate College is extremely important to the submission process, as they approve your final ETD, process embargo requests, and answer questions about your degree progress and graduation status.
• The University Libraries are also extremely important to this process, as they make your ETD publicly available in ProQuest and Digital Scholarship@UNLV, apply embargoes approved by the Graduate College, and answer questions about copyright, publisher policies, research impact, and more.

Everyone plays an important role in the ETD submission process

Now that we know who is involved in the submission process, let's take a quick look at the entire workflow to see how much the process bounces between the different entities we just talked about. We will deep-dive into each step later on.

1. Committee and You: student writes ETD
2. You: student submits ETD to Grad College for final approval
3. Graduate College: Grad College approves ETD, notified student and University Libraries
   • Sometimes the Grad College will send it back to the student for revisions prior to approval
4. You: student submits ETD to ProQuest
5. University Libraries: University Libraries approves ETD in ProQuest
6. You: student graduates!
7. Graduate College: Grad College sends final Conferral List to the University Libraries
8. University Libraries: University Libraries published ETD in ProQuest and Digital Scholarship@UNLV

ProQuest

• Global database with materials from over 3,100 institutions worldwide
• Often requires a paid subscription to access materials
• Well-known among academic researchers, providing a wide-reaching audience

Digital Scholarship@UNLV

• UNLV's institutional repository specific to UNLV research
• Open Access - anyone with Internet can access, no paywall, no account needed
• Searchable by academic unit, event, title, keyword, and author type (grad student, faculty, etc.)
• Managed by the University Libraries (local customer service)
• Authors receive monthly download reports via email to track the impact of their work

Below are screenshots of the home page of each platform. Since ProQuest isn't UNLV-specific, they have their own logo and color scheme, whereas Digital Scholarship@UNLV has the UNLV color scheme and logo.