the paper is to do a comparative evaluation on the four major digital theses and dissertations management systems used in the mainland china, which are trs, tpi, tasi and idl-etd. the evaluation analysis is primarily based on the systematic tests on these systems conducted by dut (dalian university of technology) library. special focuses are on the distinctive features of each system such as their performance in terms of stability, reliability, openness, capacity of backdating, copyright protection, service monitoring, document conversion and release automation, log management, statistical tabulations, vendor’s technical support and so on. in addition, authors provide a statistics on the choice of academic dissertation system of most 985^a) colleges and universities in china.