Chinese Doctoral Dissertations Abroad (1905–1962): A Dataset Derived from Yuan Tongli's Guides

This dataset includes 4,717 doctoral dissertations completed by 4,683 Chinese PhD recipients between 1905 and 1962. It was compiled from the three Guides to Doctoral Dissertations prepared by the leading Chinese bibliographer and librarian Yuan Tongli 袁同禮 (1895–1965), former director of the National Peking Library prior to the Communist Revolution. These catalogs constitute the most comprehensive and authoritative resource on the earliest Chinese recipients of doctoral degrees. Drawing on his widely recognized expertise as a librarian, Yuan compiled lists of dissertations by Chinese scholars through visits to libraries abroad, consultation of published catalogs, and reliance on an extensive network of personal and professional contacts among researchers and library specialists worldwide.

The dataset provides information on the PhD recipient (including year of birth for US-trained PhDs only), discipline, university, year of graduation, and dissertation title. The majority of dissertations — 2,782 (59%) — were completed in the United States by 2,777 individuals. In continental Europe, 1,583 dissertations (33.6%) were completed by 1,560 individuals, while in the United Kingdom, 352 dissertations (7.5%) were completed by 346 individuals. The discrepancy between the number of dissertations and the number of PhD recipients reflects the fact that some scholars, especially in the sciences and religious studies, completed more than one dissertation.

Methodology

The data were extracted automatically using natural language processing techniques and subsequently verified and curated manually by historians.

Detailed code, documentation, and visualization scripts are available on GitHub.

For an in-depth analysis of this dataset, see our article titled "The Great Talent Divergence: Transnational Training and the Fate of China’s Doctoral Elite (1905-1962)" to appear in Modern China.

References

YUAN, TUNG-LI (1961) A guide to doctoral dissertations by Chinese students in America, 1905-1960. Washington, D.C.: Published under the auspices of the Sino-American Cultural Society.

YUAN, TUNG-LI (1963). Doctoral dissertations by Chinese students in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1916-1961. Taipei: Chinese Cultural Research Institute.

YUAN, TUNG-LI (1964) A Guide to doctoral dissertations by Chinese students in continental Europe, 1907-1962. Taipei: Chinese Culture Quarterly Review.