Faculty of Medicine: submitting the doctoral thesis

• Notify your supervisor well in advance of your intention to submit your dissertation for the preliminary examination, so that your supervisor can start thinking about the required experts; preliminary examiners, opponent, custos, and, if necessary, a faculty representative.
• The preliminary examination process is launched in two stages at the Faculty of Medicine. Once you have submitted the doctoral dissertation for preliminary examination, the Doctoral Committee monitoring the quality of doctoral dissertations will process the application for launching the preliminary examination process.  The recommendation of the Doctoral Committee and possible comments will be sent to you by email the day after the meeting. Only after this can the launch of the preliminary examination be submitted to the Faculty Council for a decision. 
   
• Your right to pursue doctoral studies must be valid, and you must be registered as an attending student at the University throughout the examination process, all the way up to graduation. You do not have to have completed all required study credits when the pre-examination process starts.
   
• Acquaint yourself with the instructions related to the preliminary examination application and prepare the attachments required in the application.
• Prepare the manuscript for preliminary examination following the instructions given. Remember to take into account the detailed provisions by the Faculty of Medicine on the format and layout of the doctoral dissertation, as well as the Doctoral Committee's guidelines for evaluating dissertations.
• In addition to the general rules of impartiality, the Faculty of Medicine requires that the preliminary examiners must be from a different department, clinic or research programme than the dissertation supervisor and the doctoral candidate.
• Doctoral researchers are to give information in the form of their preliminary examiners, opponent, custos, and faculty representative. If custos is also the supervisor, the custos will find a new faculty representative. Faculty representatives must be professors or docents of the University of Helsinki or members of the university's teaching and research staff with the academic qualifications of a docent. The faculty representative(s) must be well acquainted with the grading criteria and regulations related to the examination of doctoral theses in use at the University of Helsinki.
• NB! The University of Helsinki does not recommend using employees of Russian or Belorussian universities as pre-examiners or opponents, or use them as scientific experts. 

No later than ten days before the meeting of the Doctoral Committee (see timetables below), submit the below mentioned documents in pdf form (in one file) to the Faculty’s Doctoral Services: meilahti-phd@helsinki.fi. 

• A proposal for the preliminary examiners, opponent and grading committee (Complete the electronic form and collect the required signatures. Electronic signatures are accepted). A missing signature can delay processing. Please ensure that both the electronic form and the submitted pdf version have same information on them. Please also ensure that you have the correct email addresses to the pre-examiners and the opponent. Include all names the expert you propose have published under. Please also mark it in your application if your name has changed during the thesis project. This makes it easier for the Doctoral Committee to check the principles of disqualification.
• A report on the doctoral student’s own contribution to the doctoral dissertation, i.e., a collaboration report (More detailed instructions are available below.)
• The author’s list of all publications. Please mark the articles used in you thesis clearly on the list. The list is to also include any submitted, not yet accepted manuscripts. All authors of a publication must be listed of all articles used in your thesis and of your other publications published in the last three years (does not apply to consortium members found in separate lists of the publication). Et al. is not enough. If one or more articles are used in another thesis, information on this is to be marked in the list.
• The registration number of the ethics committee and/or Animal Experiment Board statement (There is no need to provide a copy of the actual statement.)
• A completed and signed preliminary examination application checklist.

When submitting your application, the appearance and language of the thesis manuscript are to be finalized and the chapters of the dissertation must be in the correct order. The file is to first have the manuscript and then the final or latest versions of all published articles and submitted manuscripts in the correct order. The manuscript is to include:

• a table of contents with page numbers
• an abstract written in English (and in Finnish/Swedish, only if either of these is your mother tongue). The maximum length of each abstract is 1.5 pages/language, the recommended length is 1 page. 
•The literature review must include all finished images and tables. The modified images must include a mention of the original images. Permission to publish the image in your dissertation must be requested from the owner of the original image. Copyright information must be documented in the manuscript.

Acknowledgements page does not have to be ready, it can be included as a heading.

Submit a finalised manuscript with its component articles to Doctoral Student Services (meilahti-phd@helsinki.fi) in one PDF file using Funet FileSender. Never send the manuscript as an email attachment.

Report on the author’s contribution to the doctoral dissertation

You are to comprehensively list your contribution for each article separately. Please include your articles' JUFO classifications in the report.

In co-authored publications, the dissertation author must have a clearly definable independent contribution. With a view to ascertaining this, the researcher, the dissertation supervisor and possibly the advisory committee draw up as an appendix to the preliminary examination application a report on the researcher’s contribution to each co-authored publication. If a co-authored publication has been used in another dissertation, this must be mentioned in the report. If the I or II author has not yet defended their doctoral thesis, your application is to include information on whether the co-authored publication will be used in another doctoral thesis as well. If the article will be used in another doctoral thesis, you are to include a consent signed by the co-author that the partial work can be used in your thesis.

The doctoral researcher should deliver the draft of the report on their contribution also to the other authors of the publication.

The dissertation author must submit the report to the Faculty at the same time as they submit the manuscript for preliminary examination, and later to the preliminary examiners and the opponent. 

Language revision

The Faculty recommends that any language revision is done only after the preliminary examination once the doctoral researcher has finalised the manuscript based on the feedback from the Doctoral Committee and the preliminary examiners. The main dissertation supervisor may decide to forego language revision.

The preliminary examination application with its appendices must be submitted to the Faculty’s Doctoral Student Services no later than 10 days before the next meeting of the Doctoral Committee. The application must be submitted by 15.00 on the last submission day. The Doctoral Student Services confirms that application has arrived on time latest on day after submission day.

Please read the instructions carefully before submitting the materials and make sure that you have submitted all required documents. Please check that the scanned form and the form on E-lomake system have the same information. The documents are submitted in two separate pdf-files:

1. Thesis manuscript (manuscript and articles together in the same pdf-file)
2. The preliminary examination application with its appendices in one pdf-file.

ND! Deadlines are binding, all applications submitted after the deadline are automatically transferred to the next possible meeting.
 

Autumn term 2025

Spring term 2026

The preliminary examiners will be given approximately four weeks from the Faculty Council meeting where the preliminary examination process was launched to give their statements. If your preliminary examination was initiated by the June 2025 faculty council meeting at the latest, the table below gives the deadlines for preliminary examiner statements to ensure that the issue of granting permission to defend the dissertation in a public examination can be processed in the next possible Faculty Council meeting. If the statement does not arrive by the deadline, the processing of the issue will be delayed to the next meeting.

Deadlines for pre-examination statements if the preliminary examination was initiated before August 1, 2025

Autumn 2025

Spring 2026

Schedule of Dean’s Decision (if the preliminary examination was initiated after August 1, 2025)

The preliminary examiners will be given approximately four weeks from the Faculty Council meeting where the preliminary examination process was launched to give their statements. The table below gives the deadlines for preliminary examiner statements to ensure that the issue of granting permission to defend the dissertation in a public examination can be processed in the next possible Dean’s Decision. If the statement does not arrive by the deadline, the processing of the issue will be delayed to the next possible deadline. The doctoral study services will send you e-mail if your issue is proceed.

Autumn term 2025

Once the preliminary examination process has been launched by the Faculty council

• You will be informed of the Faculty Council’s decision the day after the meeting by email.
• After having received this information, submit the same dissertation material and a report of your own contribution to your pre-examiners in the same way as you did when submitting the preliminary examination application to the Faculty’s Doctoral Services.

Once the preliminary examiners are ready to give their statement

• The preliminary examiners, either separately or together, submit their statement to the Faculty, in which they either 
  a) Recommend granting permission to defend the dissertation in a public examination regarding the manuscript in its present form, or with minor revisions which the supervisor may approve, or
  b) Consider the deficiencies in the manuscript serious enough to not be able to recommend granting permission to defend the dissertation in a public examination.
• Once the Faculty's doctoral student services have received positive statements from both pre-examiners, the processing of the permission to defend the thesis will automatically proceed to the dean, who will make the decision regarding the permission. The doctoral candidate does not have to do anything to start the process, the doctoral student services will take care of the process. The candidate will be informed about the matter about one week before the Dean's decision.

Faculty of Medicine, together with collaboration with Faculties of Pharmacy and Biological and Environmental Sciences, has made application instructions for Rector's Decision. Join recommendations and application instructions promote equity for doctoral researchers and benefit life sciences collaboration. Faculty council accepted instructions on their meeting 28.1.2025. See application instructions (updated on 16th May): Doctoral theses criteria application_life sciences.docx

Please read carefully the doctoral committee's guidelines for evaluating dissertations.

The dissertation author must be careful with Open Access journals, since articles published in publication forums classified as suspicious (also called predator journals) will not be accepted as component articles of the dissertation. The annually updated Beall's list may serve as help in recognising questionable journals. (If the link does not work, you can easily find the list using a search engine.) More detailed guidelines for choosing the publication forum are available below.

If the summarising report of the dissertation reuses tables, images or graphs from the original publications of the doctoral candidate, it is the doctoral candidate’s responsibility to ensure from the publisher that the right to publish them as a part of the dissertation is in place. Many publishers announce on their websites that they allow the use of their publications in dissertations. The caption of the reused table, image or graph must include a note that the publisher allows their use, or that the right to use has been ascertained from the publisher, in the following manner: “Reproduced with permission from …”and a reference to the original publication. As for the original publications to be appended to the end of the dissertation, it has not been the practice to ask for separate reprinting permission, since they are presented in their original format.

The writer of the dissertation may also present unpublished research results in the summarising report. In this case, they must be referred to in an appropriate manner (“N. N. et al. unpublished results”). To avoid duplicate publication, unpublished results cannot be included in the summarising report as a segment equivalent in scope to an article, if the results are intended to be published later as an article.

Sections included in a monograph and article-based dissertation

• A one- or two-page abstract of the dissertation and its key results. It should include the following: goals, main methods, the results achieved and conclusions drawn based on the results. A list of abbreviations
• A table of contents (including page numbers!)
• In an article-based dissertation, a list of the publications on which it is based
• A list of abbreviations
• An introduction
• An analytical literature review, examining the development of information relating to the topic under discussion as well as the current situation
• A statement of the research question
• A report on the materials and methods used. The materials and methods used must be presented in written form, which may be supplemented by a table of the methods.
• The research results and discussion
• A discussion in which the independent research results are critically contrasted with previous research
• A summary, and the conclusions
• A bibliography
• In an article-based dissertation, component articles as an appendix

The cover and cover page of the dissertation must include at least the following information:

• Name of the author
• The fact that the work is a dissertation
• Name of the faculty granting the permission to print
• Research location(s)
• Doctoral programme
• Printing house
• Printing location
• Printing year
• ISBN
• Names of the supervisors
• Names of the assessors

All dissertations must include a table of contents and a list of the component articles for article-based dissertations. If one or more of the articles in the dissertation have been used as a part of a previously published dissertation, a notification of this must be included in the dissertation after the list of articles.

The cover of the dissertation depends on the publication series it is published in. All doctoral researchers at the University of Helsinki are encouraged to publish their dissertations the University of Helsinki Doctoral School's dissertation series ”Dissertationes Universitatis Helsingiensis”. For more information on covers, ISBN identifiers, and the dissertations series, please see the general instruction on publishing dissertation. 
 

System for the references and bibliography used in the dissertation

In the body text, numbering is used for literature references, which means that the list of references is in numerical order. Alternatively, in the body text, the name of the author and the publication year are used for in-text citations, in which case the list of references is in alphabetical order. All authors, the title of the article and the name of the journal must be indicated for the articles in the bibliography. Abbreviations from the Index Medicus shall be used for journals. After the name of the journal, the volume, the beginning and end page of the article, and the publication year are given. When referencing monographs and books, the title, author or editor, publisher, publication location and year, and the beginning and end pages of the reference must be included.

Retaining the original research material

The author must retain the original research results pertaining to the dissertation at least as long as the processing of the dissertation at the Faculty is underway. The results must be presented to the Faculty or to Faculty-appointed assessors on request. These guidelines apply to retaining the research material during the dissertation examination process at the Faculty. In all other respects, the researcher is responsible for complying with the provisions related to the retention of research material.

Selection of a publication forum

The Faculty recommends journals classified by the Finnish Publication Forum (categories 1 to 3). This will ensure that, in all likelihood, the publication forum is both scientifically and ethically acceptable. A list of journals classified by the Finnish Publication Forum is available on the website of the Finnish Publication Forum administered by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies. Another method of assessing the quality of a publication forum is to check whether it has been listed on Medline, Web of Science and PubMed. If JUFO drops a journal to the zero category, the journal is considered a predator journal by the Faculty either from the beginning of the next calendar year, if the drop occurs in the middle of the calendar year, or from the beginning of the drop, if the drop occurs on January 1. After this, new articles submitted to the journal in question will not be accepted for dissertations at the Faculty of Medicine. This decision does not apply retrospectively for already published articles.

The Finnish Publication Forum listing does not include assessments of the most recent journals, and they may not yet have been indexed on Medline, PubMed or Web of Science. When assessing new publication series, the prestige of the publisher plays a large role. If the publisher is a prestigious and recognised scientific society or a renowned scientific publisher, it can be assumed that the new publication forum is appropriate, e.g., an Open Access version of a well-known journal.

Please be cautious about open access journals. More information on questionable open access publishers and journals is available on the Scholarly Open Access webpage. Articles published in questionable forums are not accepted as part of a dissertation. Thus, it is important for doctoral candidates and their supervisors to carefully check the publication forum selection related matters described above and save all communications with the journals.