Doctoral thesis
The doctoral thesis must be submitted to the Assessment Committee before the end of the candidate's contract (for employed PhD candidates).
The Doctoral Degree regulations and guidelines of Utrecht University outline the necessary requirements, procedures, responsibilities, and rules. It is the shared responsibility of both the supervisory team and the PhD candidate to ensure that the research presented in the thesis meets the required quality standards.
The GSLS provides additional guidelines for the content of the doctoral thesis for GSLS PhD candidates. The goal of the PhD journey is to train the candidate as an independent scientist, equipping them for a career within or beyond academia. The thesis should reflect this scientific development.
More information on thesis requirements, content and the Assessment Committee can be found on the PhD website.
Checking a doctoral thesis for plagiarism
The primary supervisor (first promoter) has to check a PhD thesis for potential plagiarism after the PhD candidate has uploaded it in MyPhD for approval by the PhD supervisory team. You can use the university’s plagiarism software tool for that. Utrecht University recently switched to Turnitin as the software tool for a plagiarism check. Since Turnitin is not integrated in MyPhD, you have to use the standalone version.
Several tips:
- You may need to switch on the ‘quick submit button’ first via your settings.
- Upload only those parts of the PhD thesis that have not already been published, otherwise you get many similarities. Alternatively, you may opload the entire PhD thesis and look only in the similarity report at the sections that have not been published before.
- Use the filter options in the similarity report. Especially, the ‘exclude bibliography’ and the ‘exclude small matches’ options are useful.
More information on the standalone use of Turnitin.