Willard McCarty <MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca> (02/23/90)
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 1090. Thursday, 22 Feb 1990. Date: Thu, 22 Feb 90 01:06:38 EDT From: "Matthew B. Gilmore" <GY945C@GWUVM> Subject: citing theses & dissertations Doesn't citing theses and dissertations have something to do with their accessibility? Why do you cite anything at all? Verification and proof of your sources. Well, at least until recently, theses and dissertations were hard to get a hold of, both bibliograpically and physically. They are not "published" in the same way a book/article is, and are not as readily available. So what good did it do your reader to know that something could be found in a dissertation-- they didn't have access. Now access is just expensive and time consuming--either through UMI or through the university for those who do not submit copies to UMI. Level of sophistication might be an issue in whether to cite a MA/MS thesis. For some fields if the work was not done for the PhD it probably just is not seen as part of the scholarly communication of that discipline. Comments? Matthew Gilmore