Identifying shifts in research priorities at UCL from 1916-2025: A summary bibliographic dataset

As part of International Love Data Week 2026 - and in celebration of UCL’s Bicentenary celebrations - we are releasing an open dataset of doctoral thesis titles and abstracts from UCL Discovery, spanning the 1910s to the present day.Introduction: The introduction of the PhD in 1914, when UCL as a college of the University of London, first began awarding doctorates, was a strategic effort to attract international students at a time when British universities transitioned from a reliance on private philanthropy to state finance; consequently, the data reveals as much about institutional survival as it does about academic inquiry.Doctoral research at UCL: Doctoral theses offer a distinctive perspective on research cultures, providing earlier and more expansive insight into emerging questions than journal articles, which are often constrained by disciplinary gatekeeping. Read longitudinally, thesis titles and abstracts can indicate how research priorities shift, how certain problems become objects of study and how institutional contexts influence knowledge production. At the same time, doctoral research is structurally constrained. Research topics are shaped by supervisory expertise, disciplinary gatekeeping (Becher and Trowler, 2001), funding regimes and institutional priorities where research influences practice and policy.Over the years, UCL merged with numerous specialist institutions, each with different practices for documenting and preserving research. This has resulted in inconsistencies and absences driven by changing administrative priorities. The dataset is, therefore, both uneven and incomplete and hard copies may not always be available or listed on Explore (UCL's catalogue). However, it offers a unique lens for exploring doctoral research over time. This dataset is therefore intended to support contextual and critical exploration, rather than definitive interpretation or quantitative comparison. The collection includes titles and abstracts (where available), though it excludes author names and full-text files.About the data: This dataset spans all disciplines across UCL and supports multiple analytical frameworks - examining the emergence of new fields, gender and doctoral access, disciplinary boundary formation, the globalisation of research, the influence of war and social upheaval on research priorities, or patterns of interdisciplinarity over time. Each lens reveals different dimensions of how knowledge was produced, contested and legitimated across the sciences, humanities and the social sciences.Released openly as part of Love Data Week 2026, this invites further exploration and reuse supporting a wide range of exploratory analyses. Researchers might trace the transition from philosophical to experimental methods, observe how education has intersected with sociology or economics, or examine how ‘silences’ in the data identify groups that were consistently marginalised. Further, as the record is an evolving institutional one, these inquiries are best approached qualitatively.Acknowledgements: This dataset was made possible through the support of Dominic Allington-Smith and the UCL Open Access Team.ReferencesBecher, Tony. Trowler, Paul R. Society for Research into Higher Education. Buckingham : Society for Research into Higher Education & Open UP, 20012nd ed.Harrison, A. S., Judges, A. V., Lauwerys, J. A., and Weitzman, S. (eds) (1952) Studies and Impressions, 1902-1952. London: Evans Brothers.