Pre-1975 North American dissertations added

9Dec2008

Last month, I finished cross-referencing Thomas Bechtle and Mary Riley’s Dissertations in Philosophy Accepted at American Universities, 1861-1975 (New York: Garland, 1978) against other sources of philosophy dissertations, including Dissertation Abstracts International, The Pragmatism Cybrary, and various library catalogs.

As described in the preface, Bechtle and Riley compiled a preliminary list from standard sources, including Dissertation Abstracts International and Comprehensive Dissertation Index, and attempted to contact university libraries to verify each dissertation. The resulting list contains 7,503 dissertations. By far, this is the most methodological index I’ve come across, but I think it’s still important to verify entries against other sources when we’re not consulting a hard copy of the dissertation.

Our final list turned up 7,429 dissertations, including several hundred we consulted at libraries in summer 2007. These have all been added to the database, bringing our total number of dissertations up to the 9,000 range.

In addition, 1,087 dissertations were listed in at least one source and still need to be verified, probably by checking library catalogs. Once this is done, Phylo will contain every North American dissertation written in philosophy before 1975.

As a preview, I’ll start doing the same cross-checking for post-1975 dissertations in January. By far, the most helpful source here will be Review of Metaphysics, which has published an annual list of dissertations since 1957.