Faculty of Science: submitting the doctoral thesis

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This page provides detailed instructions to the students of the Faculty of Science on how to submit a doctoral dissertation for preliminary examination. Remember to first read the general instructions on the planning of the timetable and the preliminary examination aimed at all doctoral students at the University.

Should you have any questions on how to launch the preliminary examination process, you can always contact the doctoral student services of your home faculty.

Submitting a dissertation for preliminary examination

Always take these into account:

  • The doctoral candidate is responsible for the content of the dissertation submitted for preliminary examination. The supervisor(s) are responsible for ensuring that the quality of the dissertation meets the criteria for preliminary examination. The main supervisor decides whether the dissertation manuscript must undergo language revision.
  • The Faculty Council will discuss the appointment of preliminary examiners based on the proposal of the doctoral candidate’s coordinating professor. The preliminary examiners selected by the Faculty Council will be notified of the decision in writing.
  • Before sending the dissertation manuscript for preliminary examination, it will go through a plagiarism detection check through the Ouriginal system (previously called Urkund). Further information about Ouriginal is available in the article about plagiarism detection.
  • When planning the dissertation examination timetable, it is good to be aware of the Faculty Council meeting times.
  • Remember that you have to be registered as an attending student through the whole examination process all the way up until your graduation.

How the examination launch process works:

  1. Once the dissertation manuscript is ready and doctoral studies completed, the coordinating professor and supervisor(s) start looking for preliminary examiners.
  2. After having consulted the doctoral candidate and the supervisors, the coordinating professor proposes preliminary examiners to the Faculty with this e-form. The doctoral candidate may object to the selection of preliminary examiners.
  3. Before the dissertation manuscript is sent to the preliminary examination, it will go through a plagiarism detection procedure.
  4. The Faculty Council appoints at least two preliminary examiners for the dissertation.
  5. The doctoral candidate submits the manuscript to the Faculty in one PDF file, including also published and as yet unpublished articles, to kumpula-phd@helsinki.fi within a week of when the Faculty Council has appointed the preliminary examiners. At the same time, the doctoral candidate must submit a report on their contribution to each co-authored publication, if one is not included in the dissertation manuscript.
  6. The Doctoral Student Services of the faculty will provide the preliminary examiners with guidelines and the dissertation manuscript.

What happens next?

The preliminary examiners will have two months to submit, either jointly or separately, a written reasoned statement on the dissertation. The Faculty Doctoral Student Services will forward the statements received to the doctoral candidate and other necessary parties.

In their statements, the preliminary examiners must pay attention to at least the following matters:

  • The significance and status of the research within the research field
  • The scope of the dissertation and the sufficiency of the material, the significance of the content and deficiencies of the manuscripts submitted for publication
  • The application and development of the research methods
  • The derivation of the results from the material studied
  • The consistency of the structure of the work
  • Familiarity with and use of the literature
  • The composition of the dissertation (presentation, style and language)
  • Sufficiency of the doctoral candidate’s own research contribution (if the dissertation contains co-authored articles): whether the author has contributed sufficiently to the dissertation as a whole

If they so wish, the doctoral candidate has the right to submit an objection to the preliminary examination statements before the Faculty Council processes them.