Dissertations are the default “rite of passage” through which students become researchers. Doctoral research typically passes through several phases of approval by an institutional community: the proposal acceptance, the internal upgrade/review, and the external panel or examination. Thus, they are a good compass of what different institutions consider “satisfactory knowledge” to become an academic. Moreover, other than briefer genres of academic writing such as journal articles, dissertations tend to require in Germany, on average, 5 years <ref xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" target="https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?i5wnJN">(Jaksztat et al., 2012)</ref>. Hence, it is safe to say that the reference lists contained in 1,000 Literature ETDs represent the readings of at least 5,000 years of human research that has not been analyzed until now.