Electronic Theses and Dissertations @ Baylor University: Home

The following resources are provided from personnel in the Graduate School and are available from their website.

• Convert to a PDF/A and Embed Fonts
• Copyright and Final Approval Form
• ETD Resources
• Forms for ETD Process
• Thesis Formatting Workshop (slides)
• Preliminary Technical Review
• Outstanding Dissertation Awards

Since Fall 2005, the Graduate School at Baylor University has required that all theses and dissertations be electronic only and submitted online to the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection in the BEARdocs institutional repository. The purpose of this guide is primarily to provide general information related to ETD issues and information about the process of submitting ETDs to BEARdocs. The primary audience is graduate students who are preparing to submit their thesis to BEARdocs and the faculty who work with these students.  

Advantages of holding theses and dissertations in an open and online environment include:

• ETDs are more easily discoverable because the repositories are accessible to search engines like Google and others.  Google also adds content pulled from institutional repositories to Google Scholar.
• Scholars and researchers can more easily find other scholars and researchers who share similar interests.
• New research is more quickly encountered than it is in the traditional print publishing environment.
• Potential to make your name and your work more well known, which may enable getting employed more quickly.
• Plagiarism of openly accessible work is easier to detect than plagiarism of print works.
• Within the BEARdocs system, you can demonstrate interest in your thesis via the usage data provided.

For detailed information on the practices of other institutions with ETDs, the ETD community maintains this spreadsheet.  To find electronic theses and dissertations at other institutions use the Global ETD Search provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.

The submission of your thesis to the ETD submission system, is a simple process and should require very little time.  Below are the basic steps for this process.  If you have any questions or encounter any problems, contact libraryquestions@baylor.edu

1. Login -- with your Bear ID and password -- to the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Submission System at: http://baylor-etd.tdl.org.
2. More than one entity at the university can use this submission system. To submit to the Graduate School, make sure you select Baylor -- Graduate School and make sure the button says Start Graduate School Submission before you start your submission. 
3. Some personal information about you will be supplied automatically because of your Bear ID/password login. If this information is not accurate (usually issues with name changes), contact personnel in the Graduate School so they can correct this information after you have completed your submission.
4. Completion of the submission form should not take long and should be a straight forward process.  Some tips to make the process as smooth as possible are listed below:
   • Read the sticky notes on each page before you complete the information on that page.
   • Place your mouse over the "information icon" to see the help information for each part of the submission form.
   • Any part of the form flagged with an asterisk (*) is an area that must be completed.
   • For the Program field, start typing the name of your program, and a list with the programs should display, allowing you to select your program from that list. This is also true for the Department field, but all departments begin with Baylor University. . .

     Sticky Note	Information Icon

5. You must agree to the license agreement.  The license agreement gives Baylor University and the Texas Digital Library (the host of the ETD submission system) non-exclusive rights to distribute (if not embargoed) the thesis and to make copies (for preservation purposes, in case we need to convert it to another format in the future).  The author/creator of the work retains all copyrights.  The license also asks that the person submitting the work guarantees that s/he is the copyright holder and that s/he has permission to use any third-party (copyright-protected) material used in the work.
6. Degree Date -- Use the calendar function to select the appropriate graduation date, either May, August, or December and the appropriate year.
7. Defense Date -- Use the calendar function to select the exact date of your defense.
8. Submission Type -- Several options display; select either Dissertation or Thesis, whichever is appropriate for your degree.
9. Committee Chairperson -- This part of the form provides the option to identify more than one person.  Only provide one name -- the name of the person who served as your advisor/mentor/chairperson/supervisor during the writing of your thesis/dissertation. Start typing that person's name. If the name appears on the list, select it. If it doesn't appear on the list, type the full name as you know it -- LastName, FirstName.
10. Previously Published Material -- This section refers primarily to students whose theses have chapters that -- as a departmental requirement for graduation -- consist of the word-for-word full text of articles that have been published in peer reviewed journals. In this field, provide the complete citation for each work using this format:
    
    Author1Lastname, Author1Firstname; Author2Lastname, Author2Firstname.  "Title of Article.  Journal Title (year) volume#: issue#, page numbers.
    
    Separate multiple citations with a semicolon.  For example:
    
    Smith, James; Jones, Sarah.  "This is the Title".  This is the Journal Title (2015) 35:4, 23-35; Smith, James.  "This is Another Title".  This is Another Journal Title (2014) 24:2, 38-50.
     
11. Embargo Options -- Select the same embargo option that you and your advisor selected on your "Copyright and Final Approval" form.  You may want to view the "Embargo" section of this guide for information on making that decision. 
12. Upload Documents -- You are required to upload a:
    • Primary Document -- Thesis document in the PDF/A format.
    • Supplemental Document -- "Copyright and Final Approval" form and all documents that give permission for the use of third-party (copyright-protected) content in your thesis -- i.e., previously published journal articles that are also chapters in your work.
13. Confirm and Submit -- You are provided one more opportunity to review the information and documents you've provided.  You can click on the "[edit your...]" link associated with each section if you need to make changes.  Once you have clicked on the "Confirm and Submit" button, you will not be able to make changes unless Graduate School or library personnel send you a "Needs Correction" notice.  
14. At any point, you can login to the submission system to see the current status of your submission, as well as a log of comments related to your submission.  Although you can't make any changes in your submission, you can send a message to Graduate School or library personnel from within the system.
15. Early in the semester after you graduate, your thesis will be "published" to the BEARdocs Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection, which means the descriptive information (including the abstract) will be findable by search engines and the full text of your thesis will be accessible -- if you have not embargoed the work.  

• Once the thesis is published in BEARdocs, the thesis will be assigned a permanent URL that you can use in your CV, on web pages, or anywhere you want to promote your thesis.  
• To obtain that URL, look for your thesis by your name in the BEARdocs Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection a couple of months after you have graduated.