It's time for our yearly usage report of UM-Flint graduate students' digitized final capstone projects, theses, and dissertations. Over the past few years, we have been able to track works uploaded to Deep Blue (the University of Michigan’s repository of scholarly work), and in 2020 we also gained access to some statistics from Proquest's Dissertations & Theses Global, which is one of the largest databases of graduate works in the world.
Let’s take a look at some of the year’s statistics from Deep Blue. The following data includes all uploaded works as of December 2020 and all downloads that occurred in 2020.
2020 saw a significant drop in the amount of usage compared to 2018 and 2019. We imagine that the pandemic had some effect, based on the falling usage in the later months of 2019 that continued into 2020.
The next graph shows the comparative percentages of downloads according to each program. Liberal Studies and Public Administration are the oldest programs and have more works associated with their programs (214 and 247, respectively), meaning they had more of a chance to earn downloads. Incredibly, Computer Science's eleven works gained over 11,000 downloads last year with the majority attributed to a single thesis.
Now for the retrieval data we have from Proquest's Dissertations & Theses Global, PDTG is a database that many colleges and universities subscribe to and most of the content is not openly accessible. The following data includes all uploaded works as of December 2020 and all retrievals that occurred in 2020. The usage data we have from Proquest differs from the data we get from Deep Blue, but we've given as close a comparison as possible.
| Country/Area | Retrievals |
|---|---|
| United States | 2,175 |
| Australia | 329 |
| Canada | 242 |
| United Kingdom | 240 |
| China | 157 |
| Turkey | 137 |
| Malaysia | 98 |
| Thailand | 88 |
| Egypt | 86 |
| Taiwan | 54 |
If you have any questions about depositing your graduate work please see our FAQ or contact Liz Svoboda at esvoboda@umich.edu.
University of Michigan-Flint
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