Proquest Dissertation Analysis

Introduction Productivity measurement has become a major issue for university leaders. Federal and state governments support teaching and research with significant investments. When university leaders are seeking new funding, it is not uncommon that they need to justify their request with productivity measurement metrics and equally important research output consumption metrics. However, it is often very difficult for university leaders to generate these metrics as they lack access to relevant data and tools to analyse and visualize large amounts of data. Interested to address the diverse needs of university leaders, ProQuest and Indiana University analysed the ProQuest Dissertation & Theses Global (PQDT Global) database, an extensive and trusted collection of 3.8 million graduate study dissertations with 1.7 million full text records and editorially assigned metadata created by subject area experts. The database offers comprehensive North American and significant international coverage. Worldwide access to the database is logged at the dissertation level by ProQuest. Usage data mining is important for understanding user behaviour (Srivastava et al., 2000). The ProQuest Dissertations Dashboard released in 2014 provides easy access to dissertations, metadata, and usage data. It is available for free to leaders of any university that shares dissertation data with ProQuest.