Skip to Main Content

Theology: Theses & Conference Papers

This guide presents key resources for staff and students' research

Research Repositories

A research repository is a place to store intellectual research outputs. A research repository may be an institutional repository for housing the research outputs from a specific institution (like OUR Archive) or a subject repository for housing the research outputs of specific subjects/disciplines (like SSRN).

Try searching these sites to find a variety of publications and research outputs including theses, technical reports, conference papers and working papers.  

Thesis & Dissertations

These resources are great places to start looking for theses and dissertations written in New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific.  For theses and dissertations not held at the University of Otago Library, or available open access online, request through Interloan.

The Thesis Information guide contains links to a large number of international thesis sources.

Below are some Theology specific repositories:

Conference Proceedings

Papers presented at academic conferences can be found in a variety of places. Sometimes they are collected and published in book form or in academic journals - often in supplements. These proceedings may be found through a search of a library catalogue or through many of the databases that you use to locate regular journal literature such as Scopus or Web of Science.

In some databases, you can limit your search to these types of publications. So you could run a search on a general subject area like equality, and limit the publication type to retrieve only conference proceedings. These documents are referred to in different ways, including congressesmeeting papers, and conference proceedings. You can also use keywords such as "proceedings" or "abstracts" to search along with your other search terms.

Remember that often the terms you search with in databases will need to relate to the conference as a whole, rather than to specific abstracts or topics that interest you.

More often than not, conference proceedings will be more difficult to locate than this. Another strategy is to identify the organizations that hold these conferences and check their websites for information on them. Many do make their proceedings and other information from conferences available. For example, the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) site provides public access to past summaries of conference proceedings. 

Researchers may deposit a copy of their conference papers in an institutional respository or make it available on their personal website.

Google Scholar is becoming an invaluable source of information on conference papers and proceedings.  Try using the "Advanced Search" option to combine your search terms with words like conference, proceedings, congresses, symposium.

Interloan - If you have a citation for a conference paper, but could not find a copy using any of the methods described above, you can submit an Interloan request for the conference paper and we will try to get you a copy.