My doctoral project aims to build a map of contemporary literary research practices in German universities. To do so, I will apply reference mining techniques on a corpus of ca. 1,000 full-text electronic doctoral dissertations (ETDs) from Literature Departments in Germany (2000-2020) compiled via a research agreement with the National Library. In the following lines I will explain why ETDs are a necessary source to gain a much-needed strategic bird sight of the field, but also, what the potential problems of data heterogeneity in this dataset are, and how they will be addressed.