-Theses of CSU students can be located in Scholar and many are available online. Some CSU dissertations are also available online. Print dissertations are cataloged as books and interfiled with the other engineering books on the fourth floor of the Library.  To search Scholar for theses and dissertations, click on the "limit/sort search" button and then choose "Thesis (PHD,M) in the drop-down menu next to "Material Type."

-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 borrow the full text (in print format), 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.