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The present study aims at investigating the challenges that non-native English-Speaking students face when writing a thesis. In order to explore this issue, a quantitative research method was used, by means of a survey questionnaire, which addresses MA students of English in three universities in Algeria. Consequently, in order to find out the challenges they face when writing a thesis, a questionnaire was designed and administrated as the main instrument of the study. The total number of participants was 120 second-year MA students. The data was analysed statistically using the SPSS programme. The findings show that second-year MA students face challenges in writing a thesis, such as citing references and following the academic guidelines while the discussion section of a thesis is considered the most difficult part to write during this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If researchers no longer face difficulties to have access to published resources which are exploding in all disciplines, they, however, make tremendous unsuccessful efforts when looking for unpublished documents (grey literature) to develop their research. For the case of theses, several researchers do not know about topics treated by their peers. Moreover, they often find constraints to get access to a specific title’s or author’s thesis. They also make a long distance, waste time and money in the attempt to reach a desired thesis. For years, this has constituted a real problem for Algerian researchers. The Research Center for Technical and Scientific Information (CERIST) in Algeria has innovated by establishing the National Portal for Recording Theses (P.N.S.T.) as a device that aims above all at caring about national scientific production in terms of theses. It is a central catalogue for registered research topics and maintained theses that provides a certain visibility of research in the country. This portal was also set up with the intention to put an end to the researchers ‘difficulties when seeking for theses. In our paper, we have attempted to evaluate whether the researchers’ situation has known any improvement. To reach this goal, a questionnaire in Arabic was administered by e.mail to a sample of researchers at the University of Constantine 2. 50 university teachers and 50 Ph.D students were concerned by this qualitative study. An informal interview helped us to communicate with researchers. The analysis of the survey led to significant results that showed the positive points of this portal and the various constraints that still face researchers when attempting to explore this information gate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]