Sharing Knowledge Worldwide

Honors student scholarship reaches around the world in ways you may not know! Readers are connecting with BYU Honors thesis research through the ScholarsArchive digital repository – and the number and locations of these readers just might surprise you. Last month alone (August 2023), Honors theses were downloaded 2,469 times!

2019 marked the first calendar year that every graduating Honors student's thesis was uploaded. So far, 333 BYU undergraduate Honors theses have been uploaded to ScholarsArchive, and have been downloaded over 94,000 times!

As the culminating experience of the Honors Program, an Honors thesis represents original scholarship in each student’s respective field of study. Typically, students work on independent, faculty-mentored research or a creative project during their junior and senior years, culminating in new knowledge and a unique contribution to their discipline. Each Honors thesis represents research of excellent quality that merits publication, presentation, or distribution beyond the campus community. Digital readership is literally expanding that distribution across the globe.

For many years, BYU has published Honors theses and housed the physical copies in the Harold B. Lee library. In 2018, the Honors Program began uploading and publishing the theses digitally as well, through ScholarsArchive – the institutional repository for the scholarly and creative content produced by BYU faculty and students. ScholarsArchive makes research, publications, data, and journals available to a global audience. Thanks to this on-line digital archive, people and institutions anywhere can access, download, and cite Honors student work.

Most people find the Honors theses from a Google or Google Scholar search. Honors theses have been downloaded by 5,707 different institutions in 192 different countries. So far in 2023, the top five countries with the most BYU Honors theses downloads were:

1. United States 39,985
2. India 11,164
3. United Kingdom 4,486
4. Canada 2,665
5. Philippines 2,392

By now you may be wondering what all of these readers are looking at. Here are the top ten most downloaded undergraduate Honors theses:

	Undergraduate Honors Thesis Title	Author	Year Published	Total Views
1	Steering System for SAE Baja	Dallin Colgrove	2019	15,605
2	Women in the Early Mongol Empire: Female Types in the Secret History of the Mongols	Aspen Greaves	2020	4,230
3	Forgetting the Mine Wars: Erasing Insurrection in West Virginia History	Samuel Heywood	2020	2,928
4	The Legacy of Jazz Poetry in Contemporary Rap: Langston Hughes, Gil Scott-Heron, and Kendrick Lamar	Madison Brasher	2020	2,863
5	Peculiar Students of a Peculiar Institution: a Historical Analysis of Racial Minority Students and Race Relations at Brigham Young University as Presented in the Banyan, 1911-1985	Grace Ann Soelberg	2021	2,589
6	Waste Vegetable Oil Properties with Usage and Its Impact on Artisan Soap Making	Jenalyn Thorpe	2018	2,079
7	A Look at Coco Chanel, Fashion, and History: An Introduction to and Translation of La Construcción de la Marca Personal de Coco Chanel a través de sus Fotografías	RiLee Andros	2020	2,006
8	The Battle of the Sexes: Magagu v. Swift	Madison Savoie	2019	1,909
9	The Political Nature of Tourism: How a Country’s Political Factors Influence Tourist’s Willingness to Travel	Camilla Alarcon	2021	1,815
10	Sacred Time in the Work of Makoto Shinkai	Kassandra I. Schreiber	2018	1,450

We are proud of the academic work created by our Honors students, and are excited to see the impact of their Honors theses reaching well beyond the walls of the Maeser Building and the BYU campus. Browse the collection yourself, and look for ways you can connect with Honors scholarship at https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/.