Digital Repository brings grad student research to the world

Graduate student research is shared globally through the Iowa State University Digital Repository. The online collection of scholarly works by Iowa State faculty, staff, and students is freely available to the public. Over one-third of the 120,000 items in the repository are works by graduate students.

Since the early 2000s, all dissertations and theses have been added to the Digital Repository, as have creative components from 2018 to present. Published articles, conference presentations, and even teaching materials like syllabi and lessons are also types of scholarship graduate students may choose to submit to the Digital Repository. The repository also highlights outstanding student research by hosting recordings of the winning presentations from the Graduate College’s annual Three-minute Thesis competition.

Public Access Benefits Student Authors and Their Readers

Graduate students benefit in many ways from having their scholarship in the Digital Repository:

• Researchers can easily find these works through sites like Google Scholar, increasing opportunities for the information to be downloaded, read, and cited. Open, equitable access expands the reach and impact of research.

• Authors can clearly see the number of views and downloads over time, track where in the world their work is being read, and report activity to show their impact.

• And, links to items in the Digital Repository are stable so students can feel confident sharing them on their CVs and websites knowing their works will be available long after they graduate.

Data-driven Success Stories

By sharing graduate student scholarship through the Digital Repository, the University Library and the ISU Graduate College commit to advancing our land grant mission and fostering graduate student success. Sharing scholarship via the repository has proven success:

• Graduate student materials were downloaded 1.75 million times last year in over 200 countries.

• The creative component “Deep learning for image classification on very small datasets using transfer learning” has 69 citations on Google Scholar. The Digital Repository is the only online location where researchers can access this paper.

• As a Ph.D. candidate in agricultural and biosystems engineering, Vitor Martins (now an assistant professor at Mississippi State University) added his publications to the Digital Repository; one of his deposited articles from 2019 has been downloaded over 350 times and helped contribute to its 50 citations.

Boost Your Impact

Contact the ISU Digital Repository team to add your published articles, conference presentations, or course materials to increase your scholarly impact!