One of the big differences between the PubMed and CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health) databases is that PubMed indexes almost exclusively articles from scholarly journals, whereas CINAHL indexes a more varied range of document types. One often overlooked CINAHL content-type is Doctoral Dissertation.

Limiting to Publication Type = Doctoral Dissertation retrieves a search set of 22, 399+ records for doctoral dissertations, showing that dissertations are not an insignificant chunk of CINAHL’s content. Keep in mind, however, that these records contain merely citation information for the theses and not their full-text.

To obtain the full-text of dissertations, users can search Google Scholar (for a possible openly-available version of the dissertation deposited in an academic repository), request a copy of the dissertation via the library’s Document Delivery Service, or physically visit one of the MSK Library’s Tri-institutional partner libraries (WCMC) to access the thesis in question from the database Proquest Dissertations and Theses (full-text starting from 1997).

If you have any questions about identifying theses or obtaining their full-text, feel free to ASK US!