The Defence

Two months at the latest before the defence of your thesis, once the composition of the jury has been determined by your thesis director and validated by the Doctoral School, you must submit the documents detailed below to the administrative manager of your Doctoral Programme.

1/ The cover page of your thesis to check its conformity

Before doing so, you must:

•    comply with the digital thesis instructions for printing your thesis (PDF, 125 Kb)
  
   check :
•  the pdf format: the following versions are accepted: PDF 1.4 to 1.7 or PDF/A (lower versions, e.g. pdf 1.3, are not accepted)
• the validity of your .PDF file using this online test (see template)

Please note: The cover page of your thesis must include compulsory information.

Download :

• Sample cover sheet (PDF, 150 ko) (updated: November 2024).

If your thesis is co-supervised: add the name of the co-supervisor on the cover page.

If your thesis is co-supervised, download :

• Sample cover sheet (PDF, 153 ko) (updated: November 2024).

2/ A complete electronic version of your thesis in PDF format (see also the paragraph below entitled "If the thesis is written in a foreign language").

3/ Possibly, a distribution version (if you give permission for distribution on the internet and you have not obtained all the copyrights).

Printed thesis: you must have your entire thesis printed by Sciences Po - which will cover the printing costs, the postage costs remaining at your expense - at least two months before the date of your defence. Your doctoral programme will send you an e-mail explaining the procedure.
One copy of your thesis will be sent to the Sciences Po library.

You must send your thesis (including the summary in French in the case of a thesis in a foreign language) to each member of your defence jury, either in hard copy or electronically, as they wish.

4/ The Facile test result slip: you should make a screen copy of the result and not use the 'save as' function (see template).

5/ The thesis defence form (.rtf format): an electronic version (Word or .rtf format obligatory) and a signed version. The summaries of this form, of no more than twenty lines, must be typed in lower case, retaining the required capitals.

The curator of the Research Library, Michaël Goudoux, can advise you on how to complete this form correctly. Tel. 01 45 49 56 86

Publishing your thesis on the internet: to find out more, go to the page about publishing your thesis on the internet.

6/ The abstracts (in French and English), taken from the defence form, formatted (including your first and last name, the title of the thesis, the name of the thesis director(s) and the wording "Abstract"). Download the template.

It should be noted that the submission of all the required documents is a precondition for the presentation of the thesis and is managed by the administrative manager of the doctoral programme to which you are attached (management of travel and accommodation for members of the jury, reservation of the examination room, etc.).

If the thesis is written in a foreign language, the student must also include in the PDF file of the thesis (at the end of the thesis): a large summary in French (10 pages) with a title page containing only the title of the thesis in French and the words ‘Résumé’; before submitting the electronic version of your thesis to the Doctoral School, this title page should be sent, together with the cover page of the thesis, electronically to the person in charge of your doctoral programme.

The student will also provide the short summaries in French and English, extracted from the ‘bordereau de soutenance’, required for all theses.

You may, with the agreement of your supervisor, request confidentiality for a set length of time (Article 10, second paragraph of the ruling of 5 July 1984 on doctoral studies). In order to proceed in this manner you must contact your thesis supervisor via the administrative officer of your doctoral program.

We have included in the Sciences Po Thesis presentation guide (in French, updated in July 2024) (PDF, 540 Ko) recommendations on:

• The main presentation rules: text, title page, recto or verso, document structure, typographical rules, photographs, and paper selection.
• The presentation of bibliographical references and footnotes.
• Citation rules

Sciences Po's guidelines follow the guidelines of the Ministry of National Education on the presentation of theses, especially for the purpose of facilitating dissemination and archiving. These guidelines follow international norms.

On the website of the Bibliographical Agency for Higher Education (ABES), you can download the national Guide to drafting and presenting theses.

CNRS Delegation information systems offers a document presenting basic typographical rules for presenting a document - Download the document (PDF).

A style sheet is a model document offering functionalities needed to efficiently present a long and complex text. Word saves this model in .dot format in a particular folder.

Mastering this tool will serve you throughout your whole career as a researcher. Editors are increasingly frequently requesting that authors submit a structured electronic version of their texts: this trend will only strengthen in the coming years.

The style sheet enables the following:

• Unify and organize the appearance of different elements of the text (titles, footnotes, etc.). The appearance of elements is predefined. The level 1 title, used for chapter titles, is larger and bolder than the level 2 title, which is used for section titles within the chapter, and is in turn larger than the level 3 titles, which is for chapter sub-titles. Thus the style sheet's role is to ensure a homogenous layout: all chapter titles will have the same appearance.
• Automatically manage the display of pages (pagination, portrait or landscape format, for example, in the event you need to insert a large table),
• Automatically generate and update the table of contents or a table of illustrations. The styles applied to the titles allow for the automatic generation of a table of contents, which can be made "active" to enable easy navigation in the document. Finally, any change of title or pagination can be taken into account in the table of contents through a simple refresh,
• Ensure note consistency, their display (as footnotes or at the end of chapters), their numbering (you will be able to easily add a note without redoing everything), etc.  
• Produce an un index without having to go over the whole text,
• Finally, use of the style sheet is essential if you would like to disseminate the digital version of your thesis. The style sheet yields a quality PDF version: the PDF conversion of a pre-styled document creates a file that is smaller than the original. The bookmarks automatically open, enabling more efficient online viewing.

Sciences Po created a style sheet to offer the doctoral student a light and simple tool.

It includes all the styles needed to format the thesis and follows the guidelines of the Ministry of National Education.

It was tested with current computer equipment on long theses (1,200 pages and over 4,000 notes).

To install Sciences Po's style sheet, see Using Sciences Po's style sheet