publications - Published and unpublished dissertation; DOI assignment

I have recently defended my Ph.D. dissertation and submitted it to my graduate school's e-repository of scholarly works as well as to the ProQuest database. I have not heard yet from ProQuest about the respective publication, but my work appeared blazingly fast in my school's repository, which is great, as I already can cite it in my CV and elsewhere, where appropriate.

As I understand the terminology in the area, dissertation or thesis, submitted to ProQuest (or another scholarly database, for that matter) is referred to as published. On the other hand, the same document, submitted to university's e-repository or similar archive, is referred to as unpublished. Also, while I expect the ProQuest to assign a DOI to my work, my university's e-repository doesn't seem to include this step. Considering all the above-mentioned information, I am curious about the following:

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  What is the optimal strategy for maintaining and citing both unpublished and published versions of my dissertation? Since the published (ProQuest) version will not be available to people, lacking access to ProQuest, does it make sense to maintain and cite both versions, so that other interested people will be able to access and cite the unpublished version?

  
  


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  What is the optimal strategy for assigning DOI to my dissertation report (either to both versions, or to the unpublished, if ProQuest will assign DOI to the published one)?

  
  

Answer

You should avoid citing it twice, because it's the same work (think of it as a book published by two different publishers - you wouldn't cite both versions). Whether you prefer to cite it with a ProQuest DOI or with a link to the university repository is up to you, though possibly a given journal may have an opinion on which they prefer. Depending on how formal the citation style is, you could do something like:

• Bleckh, A (2015). ProQuest citation; DOI. Copy available from [repository]

which would let you use both access methods.

For DOIs, it's unlikely that your repository will assign a DOI to their version - most repositories aren't set up to issue DOIs. The repository is intended as an alternative way to access it rather than a different publication, and so material hosted by a repository tends to give the bibliographic details of the "real version" rather than provide their own.

(Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "maintaining" - are you envisaging updating it over time? This would be quite unusual for a doctoral thesis...)