Creation

Creation began in December 2019 and the majority of the data was collected by September 2020. For the years 1980 – 2001, The Art Bulletin Dissertations Completed lists were used, and from 2002-2018, the caareviews.org Dissertations site (http://www.caareviews.org/dissertations) was used to compile the basic metadata, year, author first and last name, subjects, title, institution, and advisors. Metadata was entered manually or copied and pasted from the sources.

The ProQuest database “Dissertations & Theses” was used to locate abstracts. Years completed and first and last names of authors were changed to match ProQuest data, and changes in titles were recorded. After the year 2012, there was a noticeable drop-off in abstracts reported to ProQuest. The electronic theses and dissertations (eTDs) sites for institutions with a noticeable drop-off in abstracts were searched to find missing abstracts.

The subject fields were copied directly from The Art Bulletin or caareviews.org, with no edits. CAA has made changes to the subject fields over the decades, and we have not attempted to normalize this field. Early dissertations can have no subjects and more recent dissertations can have more than the suggested three. Subjects are assigned in alphabetical order and not by order of importance to the dissertation. For the purpose of this bibliography the separate subject fields have been merged to one keyword field. Duplicate theses have been removed, spell check was run on the subjects, titles, and abstract fields. OpenRefine was used to remove any leading and trailing whitespaces, and to change the author last name and author first name to title case format. The institution field was normalized to the most common short version of the institution’s name used in the dataset and the advisor fields were normalized to first initial, middle initial, last name.