Submitting your Master's thesis for evaluation and publishing the thesis

The Faculty of Educational Sciences

Before submission

• All theses must have a title page and an abstract. The maturity test of your thesis is the abstract of your thesis.
• Check the Instructions for Students website for guidelines on how to write the abstract in your degree programme.

Technical depositing instructions

With these instructions you can submit your master's thesis. If you need more information, please see the Links section.

1. Convert your thesis (including the title page fisrt and then the abstract and finally the thesis) into a single accessible PDF file, name the file Surname_Firstname_thesis_year (without Scandinavian letters or special characters) and save it. Check that the pdf file is in text format. The easiest way to see it is to be able to select / paint text with the mouse.
2. Activate your Office 365 email if you haven´t done it yet. A thesis cannot be submitted without a valid helsinki.fi email address. (NOTE! Activation takes one night.)

3. Sign in to the submission form using your University of Helsinki username and password (link below) and proceed in the following order:

4. Carefully complete the description data requested in the fields of the form.

5. When needed, complete the Abstract field again if your work contains an abstract written in an additional language.
6. Retrieve the PDF file you have created.
7. Check again that the information is correct and complete the depositing.
8. After a successful submission your work is under a review and evaluation process that includes plagiarism detection in the Urkund system. After submission, you will receive an automatic confirmation message from the Urkund and E-thesis system.

9. After the submission, your thesis will be waiting for further processing and will not be immediately read by your reviewers.

10. N.B. Once the thesis has been submitted to the E-thesis system, it can no longer be edited. Please be careful!

11. When the review is complete, you will receive a message from the system with a grade suggestion. The grade proposal will come before the Faculty Council meeting.
12. Once the thesis evaluation has been approved at the Faculty Council meeting an attempt is made to register the performance notes of the thesis and of the maturity test as soon as possible.
13. Once the registration has done you will receive a message that will allow you to grant or deny permission for online publication in Helda (Helsinki University Open Repository)
14. N.B. Information is saved and emails will be sent to the user whose account has been used in logging in to the system. Never give your user name or email address to others!

On the submission form, select the section "Your study right has started after 1.8.2018 (or you have been transferred to the new degree program)" so that the evaluation form for the new master's thesis can be directed to your dissertation.

Submission Form of the Faculty of Educational Sciences

Publishing online

At the University of Helsinki, master’s theses are published in HELDA, the Helsinki University’s open digital repository. Once your thesis has been approved by the Faculty, you will receive an email message with a link for allowing online publication. Online publication is recommended, since your work will gain a permanent publication platform and web address. The thesis abstract and descriptive information are always published in Helsinki University´s open digital repository.

Archiving

If you do not accept the publishing license, the PDF version of your thesis will be stored in such a way that the full text can only be accessed locally from library computers ("archived") but the reference and the abstract will be published in Helda.

Urkund plagiarism detection system

The submitted thesis is processed using the Urkund plagiarism detection system. This creates a report that the assessor reads. Link to the report comes into the evaluation form in E-thesis. The report does not automatically become readable by the student. Once the Urkund system has generated the report, you will receive a message in your email. You can use the link in the message to decide whether your work will be saved in the Urkund database. The University of Helsinki recommends saving in Urkund, as this way the student can prevent plagiarism to his or her own work in the future. You can save your work in Urkund, even if you do not give permission for its open publication online. The student has the right to see the Urkund report generated from his or her own work upon request.

If you need help

• With depositing or publishing your thesis, you can contact digitutkielmat@helsinki.fi.
• In questions related to the thesis examination and assessment process, contact Siltavuori Student Services (siltavuori-student@helsinki.fi.

Links:

• Moodle pages for theses
• Combining pdf files into one for the thesis pdf
• University's abstract document (a word document). Fill in the needed information on each line and write your abstract at the end. The length of the abstract is max 1 page.
• A model document as a pdf. If needed, you can write the abstract also in other word processing programmes with the help of the model document.
• Instruction on accessibility

You may submit and publish your thesis even after you have graduated. In this case, please send e-mail to e-thesis@helsinki.fi.