-Most recent theses of CSU students are available online. CSU dissertations are also available online.  

-For online theses and dissertations from other Ohio universities, use the ETDC database.

-Proquest Dissertations & Theses (North America and Europe) provides only the first 26 or so pages of the paper.  To obtain the full text (in print format), you make an Interlibrary Loan request.

Patent searches help to determine what has previously been done on a topic.  They are especially useful when researching a topic that is very new, having little or no journal articles/conference papers written on it yet.