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Submitting your ETD to D-Scholarship@Pitt

Submitting your ETD to D-Scholarship@Pitt is a quick and simple process. After your thesis advisor or dissertation director has approved your ETD, visit the University of Pittsburgh ETD website to learn how to format your ETD and prepare it for deposit in D-Scholarship@Pitt. Once you have your final PDF of the ETD, log into D-Scholarship@Pitt to begin the submission process.

To log in, enter your University of Pittsburgh computing account username and password. Once you have logged in, you will be at the "Manage Deposits" screen. Click "new item" to begin entering information about your ETD and to upload your document(s) for review and approval.

Follow this five-step process (Type, Details, Access, Upload, Deposit) to submit your ETD.

  1. Type

    Choose the item type "University of Pittsburgh ETD."

  2. Details

    Enter the details for your ETD, matching exactly the information from the title and abstract pages of your PDF file and your ETD Approval Form.

    Add keywords that describe the content of your ETD. This will aid search engines in associating your work with searches for related terms.

    Enter an E-mail address for each of your advisors so that they will receive notification when your ETD is approved.

    In the "Number of Pages" field, enter the total number of pages in the PDF file, which may be different than the page number that appears in the footer on the last page.

    In the "Contact Email Address" field, enter your pitt.edu E-mail address. Because Pitt now allows alumni to keep their E-mail accounts, you will still be able to receive E-mail at your pitt.edu e-mail address. You can also forward that E-mail address to an account that you are more likely to use.

  3. Access

    Enter the access options, exactly matching the options on the ETD Approval Form.

  4. Upload

    Upload your PDF, following the instructions on screen.

    You may also upload additional supplementary files. Provide a brief text description of each supplementary file in the description field and choose "Supplemental material" from the "Content" drop-down box. Please refer to our guide on Adding Supplemental Files for tips on how to obtain and include the URLs for your supplemental files that you wish to include.

    You may choose to set Creative Commons license terms for your ETD only if you have already chosen "No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately" as the access option.

  5. Deposit

    Carefully review the information you've entered about your ETD. If you need to make corrections, you may return to any of the previous steps.

    When everything is correct, read the ProQuest deposit agreement, author agreement, and press the "Deposit Item now" button.

Research Data Management@Pitt

The University Library System has prepared a guide to assist Pitt researchers and students with the process of data sharing through D-Scholarship@Pitt. We offer guidance on approaches for data organization and documentation to implement during a research project, with the intent of facilitating data sharing. Read it here: Data Sharing and D-Scholarship@Pitt(pdf)

Sharing your ETD Data with D-Scholarship@Pitt flowchart

After you deposit your ETD


Follow the steps of the ETD approval process and turn in all request forms to your school. Your school will review the ETD and your supporting documents. If there are any problems, you will receive an E-mail from your school. Note that the review and approval processes vary among schools, and it may take several days to several months depending on their capacity. Some schools do not approve ETDs until after the graduation date, so it may be useful to contact them and verify that your ETD is formatted properly. Once your ETD is approved, you will receive an E-mail with the permanent URL for your ETD.

On occasion, a graduate student may need to submit more than one ETD during the same term (e.g., an ETD for a master's thesis and another for a doctoral dissertation). If this situation applies to you, you will need to complete the entire submission and approval process separately for each ETD. You may submit your ETDs simultaneously, but you should submit each ETD as a new item, i.e., as its own separate record in D-Scholarship@Pitt.

If you need help, contact your school's student services coordinator. For further information and instructions, please visit the University of Pittsburgh ETD Web site.