Thesis guidelines and submission
Title, format and printing
PhD titles need to be comprehensible and enticing to a potential reader, while at the same time not being so general and vague as to obscure what the PhD thesis is about. Furthermore, titles should be concise and informative.
Abbreviations and formulae should be avoided where possible.
DTU recommends PhD students to include a few keywords in the title to aid web-searches.
A number of PhD schools have their own template for the thesis cover. The same may not be the case for a design template for the report itself.
The DTU Design Guide has a report format that can be used or it may be useful to look at other PhD theses for inspiration.
The report cover generator is now ready to use:
Quick guide to using the report cover generator
- Go to dtu.stibodirect.com.
- Select “register” and fill out the information (registration code H5d9LwB).
- Create the cover and note the price.
- If you don’t have a PO number please contact one of your department super users who can assist you to generate a PO# in DTU Fusion.
- Finalize the order and submit it as described in the workflow.
If something is not working as expected, please contact design@dtu.dk.
If you have followed the guidelines for printing and created your thesis and cover as a pdf-file and are ready for printing, contact DTU’s print supplier Stibo.
The printing process at Stibo can take up to 12 days, since we very often see a need for corrections and adjustments.
Please be aware that a publisher/printing house will keep two of the printed copies as they are required to submit copies of printed materials to the Danish Royal Library.
ISBN no.
According to the Danish ISBN office, ISBN numbers are not provided for PhD theses.
Upload of thesis to Orbit
HR/PhD forwards the thesis and a possible corrections sheet to the Orbit team after award of the PhD degree.Submission
The thesis must be submitted by the applicable deadline. Unduely late submission of the PhD thesis without notice being given to PhD Administration & Development, will result in disenrolment from the PhD programme.
The thesis must be submitted as follows. Additional copies, format and printing are to be agreed with the department/PhD school.
On the end date of the PhD study, the PhD thesis is to be submitted/distributed:
- electronically to the PhD coordinator at the PhD school. The PhD coordinator will then send the thesis to HR/PhD via DTU DOCX.
- to the supervisors.
- HR/PhD forwards the thesis and co-author statements to the assessment committee.
When the assessment committee has completed their work and submitted a positive recommendation, additional copies of the thesis are to be distributed as follows:
- One copy for the chair of the defence session.
- One copy which is publicly available at the department after advertisement of the defence.
The parties involved may agree among themselves that the thesis may be sent in full upon request to persons interested.)
After the defence, the PhD student may furnish the thesis with a corrections sheet. The purpose of the corrections sheet is to give the PhD student the possibility of pointing out any errors and omissions in the thesis. Accordingly the PhD students states in the corrections sheet what he/she would have corrected in the thesis had it been possible.
A corrections sheet may only contain minor, e.g. linguistic, corrections. This means that new figures, tables or reference to articles and similar are not acceptable. Similarly, sentences that add new or alternative approaches to the text already submitted are not acceptable. The corrections sheet may not exceed two pages. No later than two weeks after the defence, the corrections sheet must be forwarded to the department's PhD coordinator who will upload it in DTU DOCX.
HR/PhD forwards the thesis and a possible corrections sheet to the Orbit team after award of the PhD degree.
If the entire thesis or some of it is meant to become part of a series of reports or otherwise become more widely published, this must be agreed between the PhD student and the PhD school/department concerned.
PhD theses are subject to the requirement of compulsory submission to the Royal Danish Library.
In connection with submission of physical copies, the duty to submit lies with the printer of copies for publication, unless otherwise agreed between printing house/publisher and the author.
Compulsory submission also applies to theses that are only submitted in digital form. The Danish Royal Library collects PhD theses from DTU through DTU's research database Orbit. This is considered to fulfil the requirement for compulsory submission of digital materials, and since all PhD theses at DTU are uploaded in Orbit, these are automatically submitted to the Royal Danish Library.