Theses from the University of Stirling are included in the British Library’s EThOS Service – a service that allows anyone from around the world to request an electronic copy of the full-text of a UK thesis.
Since 2007, Stirling’s theses have been made available in STORRE, our institutional Open Access research repository, and these theses are automatically harvested by EThOS. Also, if someone requests an older thesis, then the paper thesis is digitised and added to EThOS so that it is then available for others to immediately download.
During the year 2013 a total of 724 University of Stirling PhD theses were downloaded from the EThOS Service. A number of these titles were downloaded more than once – so the total number of individual downloads of Stirling theses was 2,211.
Stirling theses were downloaded by readers from across the world from a total of 92 different countries. The top 10 countries downloading Stirling theses were:
| Rank | Country |
Number of downloads |
| 1 | United Kingdom |
1441 |
| 2 | United States |
79 |
| 3 | India |
73 |
| 4 | Malaysia |
61 |
| 5 | Ireland |
42 |
| 6 | Australia |
27 |
| 7 | Pakistan |
22 |
| 8 | France |
22 |
| 9 | Egypt |
21 |
| 10 | Germany |
21 |
It’s fascinating to see the titles being downloaded – the top 10 most popular Stirling theses were:
| Rank | Title |
Downloads |
| 1 | Developing a conceptual framework for integrating risk management in the innovation project. By Khorakian,Alireza (2011) |
22 |
| 2 | The Relevance of International Financial Reporting Standards to Saudi Arabia : Stakeholder Perspectives. By Alkhtani,Sultan S. (2010) |
21 |
| 3 | The Application of Business Risk Audit Methodology Within Non-Big-4 Firms. By Kutum,Imad (2010) |
20 |
| 4 | An entrepreneurship perspective on the formation and growth of business groups in the small business sector. By Iacobucci, Donato (2009) |
18 |
| 5 | Making sense and finding meaning : comparing narratives of older people with dementia and carers about the quality of an ordinary life. By Robertson,Jane M. (2010) |
18 |
| 6 | Cost information for corporate social responsibility performance. By Metwally,El-Sayed Samy Wahbah El-Sayed (1979) |
15 |
| 7 | Retailer Brand Development and Handling Processes : A Comparative Study of Tesco Korea and Local Korean Retailers. By Cho,Young-Sang (2010) |
15 |
| 8 | The influence of leadership style on internal marketing in retailing. By Mat, Johari (2008) |
15 |
| 9 | Chinese bank’s credit risk assessment. By Mu, Yuan (2007) |
14 |
| 10 | Sustainable development indicators and local government. By Rowan, Lesley (2002) |
14 |
EThOS http://ethos.bl.uk is the UK’s national database for PhD theses, managed by the British Library. It’s a fantastic resource for researchers, with over 100,000 UK theses freely available to download and use for their research, and another 200,000 available to search and scan on demand.
Clare Allan
Subject Librarian