The Royal College of Art Joins ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Publishing Program
CAMBRIDGE, UK, December 16, 2020 – The London-based Royal College of Art (RCA) has joined the ProQuest® Dissertations & Theses publishing program and will now contribute its graduate students’ dissertations and theses to the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global® (PQDT) database, the leading global source of emerging research from universities around the world.
Consistently ranked as the top art and design university in the world by the QS World University Subject Rankings, the RCA’s doctoral research is unique and wide-ranging, covering art, design, architecture, humanities and even science and technology. Hundreds of graduate works from the RCA – the only fully postgraduate art and design university in the U.K. – will be accessible by PQDT users around the globe and broadly discoverable via citations in major subject indexes and Google Scholar.
“The Royal College of Art is committed to making its innovative and groundbreaking research openly available,” said Tom Cridford, Scholarly Communications Librarian at the RCA. "Since 2010, theses produced at the RCA have been shared through our institutional RCA Research Repository, and we’re excited to work with ProQuest to include this material in the global PQDT database. ProQuest’s ability to include important supplemental files – the creative component of the theses – was also very important to us. We hope this partnership will facilitate engagement with the RCA’s doctoral research from a new international audience while also creating potential for interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers working within art, design and other fields of study.”
"We are delighted that the Royal College of Art has chosen to partner with ProQuest to give their graduate research a wider global exposure via PQDT," said Angela D'Agostino, Vice President of Product Management at ProQuest. “It is an honor to welcome such a prestigious institution into the community of over 4,100 contributors who disseminate their research with ProQuest. The RCA’s collection of theses and supplemental materials will be invaluable to researchers across multiple disciplines who rely on PQDT to surface research in their fields.”
Dissertations and theses often provide the most up-to-date research on a particular subject and are crucial to the global academic community. Originally created in 1939 in microfilm format, PQDT has grown to meet the increasing demand of technology and the global research community to archive and disseminate graduate works. Their extensive bibliographies are often relied upon to surface and at times directly link ProQuest users to additional primary sources that might otherwise be missed.
The fast and seamless discovery of more than 5 million works in PQDT – 2.7 million in full text – improves access to this important content. The full spectrum of content in PQDT is also available in the ProQuest One™ Academic database.
About RCA (http://www.rca.ac.uk/)
The Royal College of Art, the world’s number one art and design university, provides students with unrivalled opportunities to deliver art and design projects that transform the world. A small, specialist and research-intensive postgraduate university based in the heart of London, the RCA is a high performing institution, a radical traditionalist in a fast-paced world. The RCA’s approach is founded on the premise that art, design, creative thinking, science, engineering and technology must all collaborate to solve today’s global challenges.
About ProQuest (about.proquest.com)
ProQuest supports the important work in the world’s research and learning communities. The company curates six centuries of content – the world’s largest collection of journals, ebooks, primary sources, dissertations, news, and video – and builds powerful workflow solutions to help libraries acquire and grow collections that inspire extraordinary outcomes. ProQuest products and services are used in academic, K-12, public, corporate and government libraries in 150 countries.
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