Dissertations are submitted for examination at the Faculty’s Doctoral Student Services no later than two weeks before the next Faculty Council meeting. Exact submission dates and Faculty Council meeting times are available below. Dissertations are submitted for examination electronically:
- Send the manuscript in PDF format to the Doctoral Services own Ouriginal email address (teol-tohtorikoulutus.hy@analyysi.urkund.fi) for plagiarism detection. After this, Ouriginal (previously called Urkund) will deliver a report on your manuscript to us in a few days. We will forward the Ouriginal report to your supervisor, who will review it and append their confirmation of a completed plagiarism detection check. The report will be sent to the supervisor only when they are asked to provide a proposal on preliminary examiners. Consequently, you do not have to worry if your supervisor has not received the report immediately after you have sent your dissertation to Ouriginal. We recommend that you submit the manuscript to Ouriginal at the latest on the Friday preceding your chosen submission date, as it takes a few days for Ouriginal to complete the report. It does not matter if you make minor changes to the manuscript after you have submitted it to Ouriginal.
- Complete your background information on an electronic form at the latest on your chosen submission date.
- On the same day, submit the manuscript in one PDF file to teol-tohtorikoulutus@helsinki.fi. In the case of an article-based dissertation, the manuscript includes the summarising report and articles (both published and as yet unpublished articles, the published articles of the dissertation in their publication layout), including a possible report on co-authored articles. If the manuscript is too large to be sent by email, please use Funet Filesender.
- Once you have completed the form and sent us the manuscript, we will ask your supervisors and coordinating academic for a suggestion for preliminary and faculty representatives
- The proposal must reach the Doctoral Student Services at the latest on Monday one week before the meeting.
- If the proposal does not arrive in time, the matter will be discussed at a later meeting.
- After we have received the proposal, we will send it to you for approval
If your dissertation is an article-based dissertation, please take into account the following:
- If the dissertation includes co-authored articles, include in the manuscript information about which part in each publication is your contribution. The content of the report must be such that the preliminary examiners can evaluate whether the candidate’s contribution is sufficient.
- Submit the report on co-authored articles also as a separate file in the same email together with the manuscript to teol-tohtorikoulutus@helsinki.fi.
- As all authors must approve the report, please ask your co-authors to confirm that they approve your report, and then send the information to the Faculty doctoral student services (for example forwarded email or compiled document of confirmations will suffice). This information on the approval of the report need not be included in the manuscript.
- If it is likely that the preliminary examiners will be from outside Finland, please draw up the report in English.
If your dissertation has been in preliminary examination before and the examination process has been discontinued, please take into account the following:
- Like on the first time, the relaunch of the preliminary examination process always requires the approval of the supervisors and the coordinating academic. For this reason it is important to notify them about your plans to submit your manuscript for preliminary examination in good time to allow them enough time to read the latest version of the dissertation and start agreeing on the preliminary examiners.
- When you resubmit a dissertation for examination, please include a written report on the key revisions made to the manuscript after the previous examination round.
Layout of the manuscript
All manuscripts are to be submitted for examination as a PDF file. Possible separate files must be combined as one PDF file (if you have any problem with this, we will help you).
The faculty has not issued guidelines regarding the format of the dissertation manuscript. The doctoral candidate is therefore free to use his or her own judgement, but ease of reading and handling are good principles to keep in mind. The following information should always be presented on the cover page of a dissertation manuscript: title of the dissertation, the name of the doctoral candidate, and the name of the doctoral programme.
At the preliminary examination stage, the recommended font size for the manuscript is 12 and line spacing 1.5–2. Margins should be wide enough for the examiners to be able to print out the dissertation and make notes in the margin easily if they so wish.
Doctoral dissertation manuscripts must include a one- to two-page Finnish-, Swedish- or English-language abstract after the title page. There is no separate form for the abstract; you can choose to write it the way you want. However, the abstract must include the topic of the research, the methodology used and the most significant results. The information must be presented in text form (no formulae, special symbols or figures).