Finding Research Instruments

Many dissertations and theses contain instruments, or portions of instruments, in their appendices. Seeing the instrument is likely to help you decide if it will be useful for your own research. Remember, you still need to obtain permission from the original author of the instrument to use it.

It's best to have the name of the instrument that interests you, and search in the full text of the documents to locate it. Because you're searching very lengthy documents, use the full name, not an acronym. The following dissertation sources are not good places to search by topic for possible instruments to use.

Searching By Title

Approach all the search tools below by searching for the title of your instrument in quotation marks. In ProQuest Dissertations and Theses and the UConn dissertation and theses archives, this is a full text search that will locate the instrument if it's mentioned anywhere in the document, including the references and appendices. In the open access repositories listed below, typically only information about a document is searched, so the instrument name must be mentioned in the abstract or other descriptive data.

There are a number of tools that let you search for open access dissertations across many institutional repositories. Anyone can download and read these documents. As a reminder, because they generally search only information about the documents, not the full text, so if the instrument is not mentioned in the abstract, you probably won't find it.