Research Guides: Library Research Guide on Gray Literature and Non-Academic Sources: Home

Dissertations and Theses

ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global: Citations for dissertations and theses from around the world, as far back as 1861; from 1980 forward, includes 350-word abstracts; master's theses from 1988 forward include 150-word abstracts; some available for download as PDF.
DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard): Open-access institutional repository of research by members of the Harvard community, including pre- and post-refereed journal articles, conference proceedings, theses and dissertations, working papers, and reports.

SSRN: Pre-prints, research papers, and conference papers in over 65 disciplines, including many social sciences.
PROL (Political Research Online): Pre-print server for emerging scholarship in political science.
arXiv: Open-access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in the mostly STEM fields but including quantitative finance, statistics, and economics.

PAIS International (formerly Public Affairs Information Service): Public and social policy literature of public administration, political science, economics, finance, international relations, law, and health care, including abstracts of thousands of journal articles, books, directories, conference proceedings, government documents and statistical yearbooks
CIAO (Columbia International Affairs Online): Wide range of scholarship from 1991 including working papers from university research institutes, occasional papers series from NGOs, foundation-funded research projects, proceedings from conferences, books, journals and policy briefs.
PolicyFile Index: Public policy reports and studies are published by think tanks, university research programs, research organizations which include the OECD, IMF, World Bank, the Rand Corporation, and a number of federal agencies.
PolicyCommons: Millions of reports, working papers, policy briefs, data sources, and media drawn from a directory of more than 20,000 IGOs, NGOs, think tanks, and research centers.
Harvard Kennedy School Library think-tank search: Custom Google search of the websites of universities, governments, advocacy groups, foundations, and non-governmental organizations, with a mixture of partisan and non-partisan think tanks. (No longer being updated but still potentially useful.)

Nexis Uni: More than 15,000 news, business and legal sources in full text, many back to the mid-1980's.
Factiva: Recent news articles (1980s-present) and radio and television transcripts (since 2000), as well as extensive financial market data.
Newspaper Archive: Thousands of pages of historical newspapers, including many small-town newspapers.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Full-text and full-image articles for significant newspapers dating back to the 18th century.
Alt-Press Watch: Full-text articles for over 210 publications of the alternative and independent presses, from 1970 to current.

GovInfo: Free public access to official publications from all three branches of the U.S. federal government, from the U.S. Government Publishing Office, or GPO.
DiscoverGov: Simple search interface for multiple U.S. federal government databases, including GPO's Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) and GovInfo.
EBSCOHost Military and Government Collection: A collection of government periodicals, academic journals and other content relating to to all branches of the military.
U.S. Declassified Documents Online: Access to previously classified federal records from the 20th-21st centuries, from all the presidential libraries and numerous executive agencies.
Digital National Security Archive: More than 51 thematic collections of the most important declassified documents regarding major U.S. policy decisions.

Technical Report Archive & Image Library (TRAIL): Access to U.S. government agency technical reports.
Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC): Scientific and technical reports from the Department of Defense.
National Technical Information Service (NTIS): Largest federal repository of scientific, technical, engineering, and research information, run by the Department of Commerce; includes the National Technical Reports Library, or NTRL.

ASTM Compass: Access to all of ASTM's (American Society for Testing and Materials International) more than 12,500 standards.
IEEE Xplore: Journals, conference proceedings, and active technical standards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE).
Harvard Library guide on Industry Standards: For exploring availability to other kinds of standards.

HOLLIS Images: Harvard Library's image catalog, with content from archives, museums, libraries, and other collections across Harvard University.
ARTstor: Searchable database of digital images from architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, design, anthropology, ethnographic and women studies, as well as many other forms of visual culture.
AP Images: Millions of historical and contemporary news and creative photographs, from the Associated Press and other sources.