Best Practices for Submitting Your ETD

1. Use the Template. We highly recommend use of the GW ETD Word Template to do your dissertation; it is the easiest way to make sure you have the formatting of your dissertation right and will allow you to focus your energy on content, not format. Other than that:

2. Format Your Bibliographies in the Approved Style for Your Discipline. Make sure that you use the correct formatting scheme for your discipline. Gelman Library System now offers use of RefWorks, an online tool for organizing your research and creating bilbiographies, for free to GW affiliates.
   
   
3. Get Permissions to Use Others' Works. If your dissertation includes extended quotations, published scales or tests, or other materials owned by others, be sure you have sought permission from the author(s). Proquest provides a sample letter requesting such permission which you may wish to use. It can be found in Section 6 of their online Copyright Guide.
   
   
   
4. Check your pdf. When you convert your dissertation, which you should write in whatever word processing program you prefer, to a pdf file, make sure to check it carefully, page by page, to make sure it came through correctly, that no pages are missing, etc.
   
   There are tips on preparing manuscripts at the GW Proquest ETD website; note in these guidelines that you need to "embed the fonts" in your manuscript. The tips include information on how to do this.
   
   To avoid any confusion about which draft is the final one, we strongly recommend that you submit only your final, fully approved dissertation to the GW Proquest website.
   
   
5. Recheck the Manuscript Too. Also review important parts of the dissertation such as the title page and abstract, faculty name spellings, as well as what you entered on the ETD submission forms, to make sure everything is complete and accurate. It’s better to catch errors before submission than afterwards, although you will be able to ask Proquest/UMI about making a change if you discover an error only later.
   
   
6. Completing Forms at Submission Site. When you complete the “About You” Page at the GW Proquest ETD website, be sure to complete the item “Future Mailing Address” or you will not be able to move on to the next form.
   
   
7. Abstract. You’ll be asked to paste your Abstract in box; our understanding is that abstracts can be longer than 350 words, but that in printed material Proquest produces, only the first 350 words will be used. Therefore, we recommend that the Abstract be no longer than 350 words.
   
   
8. File Size. The body of your dissertation must be submitted as ONE file. The pdf conversion program and the submission site cannot accept files larger than 100 MB—but that’s huge. If you are using multimedia and exceed that size or if the text of your dissertation is more than 100 MB, you will need to submit your work by mailing a CD or DVD, as instructed by Proquest.
   
   
9. Supplementary Files.You will have a chance to submit supplementary files along with your dissertation; this might be data, photographs, and so on. You may also want to submit your vitae or resume so that readers will be able to find out something about you.
   
   
10. Open Access vs. Traditional Publishing. GW strongly recommends that you choose Open Access publishing when you are given a choice between that and Traditional Publishing ($65).  Yes, it costs $85 more. And yes, you would no longer be eligible for royalties from Proquest if your dissertation sells enough copies to earn royalties (Traditional Publishing means that interested parties must buy the dissertation through Proquest, although some universities like GW buy free access for their community.). And yes, you may want to make extra certain that making the dissertation available free to anyone who wants it would not interfere with your ability to publish the dissertation with a commercial publisher—See Publishing Issues.
    
    However, few dissertations do earn royalties, and books based on dissertations are usually far different than the dissertations on which they were based. Choosing Open Access will make you part of a movement within the scholarly community to make dissertations and other scholarly works readily available to other scholars in the interest of advancing knowledge See Publishing Issues.
    
    
11. Embargoing Your Dissertation. In connection with the Open Access and Traditional Publishing boxes, you will be asked if you want your dissertation “embargoed” (held back and made unavailable) for various periods of time. You should hold your dissertation back only if you have a specific need to do so: (1) to pursue a patent application, which requires not publicly revealing a discovery until the patent application is safely filed, or (2) to pursue a book contract in a situation in which your publisher does not want the work released to the public as a dissertation. In most cases, any planned book will be so different from the dissertation that distribution of the dissertation through Proquest will not be a problem—see Publishing Issues.  Professional journals generally do not care that parts of an article based on your dissertation  were previously made available through Proquest’s Dissertation and Theses database.
    
    
12. Filing the Copyright. The Proquest web site will ask you if you want to pay them to file the copyright for your dissertation with the government.  This may be wise if you think that your dissertation has commercial value and envision that you might sometime want to be in position to sue someone for violating your copyright by using your work without permission. Typically, though, it is a waste of money. You already hold the copyright by virtue of being the author. If you later discover that someone has infringed your copyright, you can belatedly file the copyright with the U. S. government to position yourself to sue infringers. See Copyright Issues.