Theses in the St Andrews Research Repository: More Than Just a Final Resting Place
This is a guest post by Theses team colleague Leena Mitford.
With winter graduations just around the corner, the end of the thesis cycle for 2025 is fast approaching. For the Libraries and Museums team, it has been a particularly special year in that three of our colleagues are amongst those awarded their PhD: Vahid Davar Ghalati and former colleagues Sandro Eich and Connall Treen. Congratulations to Vahid, Sandro and Connal, together with all the graduates of 2025!
Most of you will know that for postgraduate students, submitting a library copy of their thesis to the St Andrews research repository is a requirement for graduation. But the repository is far more than a final tick on the thesis journey. Yes, it provides each thesis with a secure, long-term home. But just as importantly, it plays a vital role in the University’s commitment to open access by ensuring that, wherever possible, this valuable research is shared freely and globally.
This is the first of what we hope will be regular theses-related posts on this Blog — after a long hiatus! To celebrate the achievements of the 292 postgraduates who have submitted their theses to the repository so far this year, we’re taking a look at why the repository is such an important part of the research landscape at St Andrews.
Showcasing the University’s Theses
The repository consolidates the University’s doctoral theses and research publications in one central, searchable platform — a living showcase of the depth, diversity, and quality of the University’s research.
Browsing by Type shows you the range and extent of output. There are now over 8,142 theses, representing more than a century of scholarship. Although electronic submission only began in 2007, many print theses from before then have been digitised as part of major projects by ProQuest and EThOS. There are still gaps – particularly from the earlier years – but an estimated 90% of the University’s theses are now online, from the first PhD awarded by the University – Ettie Stewart Steele’s The structure of mannitol (https://hdl.handle.net/10023/13088) of 1919/1920 – to December 2025 and global student Caroline Haas’ Acoustic behaviour and spatiotemporal occurrence of northern bottlenose whales in the Nordic Seas (https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/1473).
Thesis data is maintained separately in the University’s research information management system, Pure. Interconnectivity between systems, however, ensures that underpinning data is linked to its corresponding thesis record in the repository. Similarly, where an author cites articles published during their research, the central thesis record in the repository provides links to these. Cheryl Si Ching Lau’s The shocking stars : numerical modelling of stellar feedback in giant molecular clouds (https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/1406).
Open Access for Everyone
Access to the repository is open to all — you don’t need to register or log in (that’s only for St Andrews students submitting their work). Whether you’re a Chemistry student looking for existing research or innovative methodology within your field, a journalist seeking insight for a COP30 story, a local historian researching Fife, or simply somebody curious about exploring new knowledge and ideas, all you need is an internet connection.
You will notice from the previous links, however, that this comes with caveats. Sometimes there is an embargo (a delay in public access) for a specified period of time. This might be to protect sensitive or confidential information, pending patents or publication, or research in progress.
For all theses, remember that the author is the copyright holder and check for a ‘Rights’ field in the record – the author might have applied a Creative Commons licence stating how their work can be re-used. Unless the author applies for an extension, the repository will release embargoed theses on the date stated in ‘Rights’.
Through embargoes, the repository balances the University’s commitment to open access with the need to safeguard sensitive content and intellectual property.
Amplifying Discoverability, Visibility and Impact
Key to a thesis record being searchable, visible, and accessible to the right audience is the metadata it contains. Students provide the author and supervisor names, degree type and award date, title and abstract, embargo and funder details. These are checked and standardised by us in the Theses team. The repository also generates a persistent Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which we add to a coversheet at the front of each thesis to ensure that the work remains findable and citable.
If you know you are looking for a St Andrews thesis, you would probably go straight to the repository, or via the University’s Library Search. However, the repository is also indexed by major search engines and specialised research databases such as Google Scholar, WorldCat, ProQuest and OpenAIRE, making St Andrews theses easier to find – or to be stumbled upon – worldwide.
For example, someone Googling ‘Papua New Guinea’ and ‘ghosts’ will find the full text in the repository of Gregory Bablis’ Ghosts and ancestral spirits as witnesses of World War Two in Papua New Guinea (https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/1231). And a quick search for ‘Financial market artificial intelligence’ leads to Lazaros Zografopoulos’ Financial market predictability with artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques (https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/1211). Statistics show that since being added to the repository in early 2025, both these theses have been viewed a phenomenal number of times, across numerous countries.This increased visibility leads to greater impact: more citations, new collaborations and partnerships, and cross-disciplinary research.
Supporting University Policy and Funder Compliance
The repository plays an essential role in the University’s Strategic plan and open access commitments ‘to make the University’s research findings widely available for local, national, and global benefit’, and ‘to use digital platforms to bring people together to share knowledge and ideas’.
These are aims shared by funders, many of whom, including UKRI, encourage or require the outputs of funded projects to be made publicly accessible. Repository records link funder names, grant numbers and acknowledgements, and to underpinning data. The repository therefore helps to make compliance straightforward, managing embargoes where necessary and ensuring that, once lifted, the research becomes freely available.
Preserving Research for the Long Term
Since the switch to electronic-only submission in 2022, each thesis record in the repository contains a minimum of two files. A PDF, which serves as an ‘access’ copy for easy viewing and sharing online, and a backend ‘preservation’ copy in the original file format. This dual-format approach ensures that each thesis remains readable, authentic, and complete for future generations — even as software and operating systems change. Where there are video/audio links, these are included in folders so that their preservation can be managed separately. See, for example, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland student Jan Foote’s Not loud, but detailed : an exploration of intimacy through amplification, recording, and production techniques (2025) (https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/1303).
The repository’s regular updates and use of stable identifiers like URIs and DOIs guarantee that each thesis remains accessible and permanent.
For older theses, digitised PDFs act as the access version, while the original print copy, stored securely offsite, is the preservation copy.
… And finally,
We shall be thinking of all the graduands on December 2nd and 3rd. As they celebrate the culmination of years of hard work, accept their awards and start the next stage of their life, they can be sure that their thesis, too, is having its ‘… et super te’ moment. It might or might not go on to be published in a slightly different form, but either way, it will be preserved in the repository, where, in a parallel path to its author, it will continue to inform, inspire and innovate.