Submitting Your Sociology Thesis to MINDS@UW

These instructions are for people who wish to deposit their sociology master’s theses OR their sociology senior honors theses to the online repository at https://minds.wisconsin.edu/ (Doctoral dissertations are deposited with ProQuest.) You may find it helpful to consult the library’s information pages including Getting Started with MINDS and Guide to Depositing Your Work. Below we give you detailed steps for the sociology process specifically. Notice that the first steps in “advance preparation” can be done immediately, even before your thesis is complete.

Note: Here is a link to FAQs about why you should want to do this.

Advance Preparation

Go to https://minds.wisconsin.edu/ click “register”, enter your UW Madison email address, and choose NetID login. You can do this step any time, the sooner the better.
After you have registered for a MINDS@UW account and you have already completed your thesis OR know approximately when your thesis will be complete, fill out this form (it is OK to fill out the form months in advance of completion): thesis repository form.
You will need to wait up to two weeks for your authorization to upload a thesis to be entered into the MINDS system by a librarian. After you have been authorized, when you click on “submissions” and click “start a new submission,” the correct thesis collection will be available to you in the “select a collection” menu. If it does not appear, please email Alice Justice ajustice@ssc.wisc.edu or pamela.oliver@wisc.edu to check on your authorization.
Finish your thesis, gain advisor approval, and prepare it for final submission.
1. Masters theses: follow the standard guidelines. (See https://grad.wisc.edu/current-students/masters-guide/; scroll down to “Guide to preparing your master’s thesis.”)
2. Senior honors theses: There are no prescribed guidelines. You may use the master’s thesis formatting (omitting the signature page) or any good polished format. Be sure that you include all relevant figures and tables, references, footnotes or endnotes. It is wise to use page numbers. You will need to write an abstract of about 300 words.
Create a cover page using the appropriate template. DOWNLOAD the template to your own computer and then edit the template, filling in the relevant information. Do not try to edit the online copy.
1. Masters thesis template sociology_masters_funding_affliations_cover_template.docx
2. Senior honors thesis template sociology_senior_cover_template.docx
3. Sample of filled out cover page: oliver_jena6_sociology_masters_funding_affliations_cover_template.docx Please notice that this is not a real master’s thesis but I did use the title and abstract of a real paper.
4. Things to notice about the cover page:
  1. You can copy/paste most of the information from your thesis.
  2. You can just delete lines you prefer not to use including affiliations, funding, name of advisor if they are not relevant.
  3. Notice the editing of the suggested citation at the bottom. You will NOT know the URL at the time you are filling that in, unfortunately.
Create a PDF file of your thesis with the cover page as the first page.
1. We strongly suggest naming the file in the form yourlastname_title.pdf . Examples: oliver_jenasix.pdf or Oliver_JenaSix.pdf or Oliver_JenaSix_thesis.pdf Less good but acceptable are names like Oliver_thesis.pdf JenaSix.pdf (Poor file names are things like “final draft.pdf” or “thesis.pdf” because they do not identify the specific paper.)
Look at the information below to see if you have what you need. (You can save your work and resume if you realize you need more information during the uploading process.)

Uploading Your Thesis to MINDS

Note: You can save your work and resume it later if needed.

Login to https://minds.wisconsin.edu/
Select a collection (Either Sociology Program Master’s Theses or Sociology Department Senior Honors Theses)
Author’s name (that’s you)
Title (Should exactly match what is on the thesis)
Other titles: You can leave this blank unless it seems relevant
Prior publication information
1. Date of issue. Use date your thesis was approved. OK to be approximate with this. This is the ONLY information you need to provide if your thesis has not previously been published.
2. Publisher, citation, series/report number, identifiers. This information is NOT needed unless your thesis has been published elsewhere
Type: select “thesis”
Language: this is usually English for our department.
Related materials/data: if there are URLs for external materials or datasets, you can paste it into the box. OK to leave it blank.
License: you can leave it blank or you can choose a Creative Commons license.
Subject keywords. select keywords that would help interested others find your thesis, including words that describe your topic, sample, key concepts. Enter one at a time and hit “add”. See screen shots below. You will be able to remove a key phrase if you make a mistake. Advice on Selecting Keywords – Key Phrases
Click on “Subject Categories.” If you double click on an item, it enters it into the keyword list. To add Sociology, put “sociology” in the filter box, click filter, then double click on sociology. This will add it to the keyword list along with the phrases you selected above. If you made a mistake, you can check the box for the bad item and remove it. (See screenshots below.)
copy/paste your abstract into the “abstract” box
Sponsors: Enter or copy/paste information about funding or sponsors (if any) into the box. You can leave it blank if there are none.
Description: You can put any other descriptive information in this box. It is ok to leave it blank. Also ok to insert one of the following
1. “Master’s thesis, Joint Graduate Program in Sociology”
2. “Senior honor’s thesis, Department of Sociology”
Upload your pdf with the cover page on it.
The next page lets you review your submission and edit as needed.
Then to the submission page. SUBMIT. You are done.

After you upload

Somebody from our staff will have to approve your submission before it will show up online. You can email Alice Justice ajustice@ssc.wisc.edu or pamela.oliver@wisc.edu if it does not appear on MINDS within a few days. Once it shows up on line, it will have a permalink, that is a permanent URL (web address) that you can add to the listing of your thesis on your c.v. or resume along with the paper title, and can share a link to your thesis with friends and family, potential employers or graduate schools, or whatever.

A few days after your thesis gets a permalink in MINDS, it will appear in Google Scholar.!! You can look yourself up and see it there, waiting for someone to find it and read it.

It is also ok to upload your thesis to other online repositories if you wish.