The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) and ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, part of Clarivate, aim to recognize and promote exceptional academic work at the doctoral level. Through annual dissertation awards, they seek to highlight original research that significantly contributes to various academic disciplines.
The dissertation awards, first introduced in 1981 and jointly sponsored by CGS and ProQuest, are designed to identify and celebrate outstanding doctoral dissertations that make a significant and unusually substantial contribution to their respective fields. The competition is open to works in two broad categories for the year 2024: Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Engineering, and Social Sciences. These categories encompass a wide range of specific fields, including computer sciences, earth sciences, engineering disciplines, and social sciences such as anthropology, economics, and psychology. The awards prioritize dissertations that represent original and highly significant contributions to the discipline, encouraging submissions that are interdisciplinary in nature, provided a significant portion of the work pertains to one of the competition fields.