Redshift distribution of the final VIPERS galaxy sample. The distributions of redshifts collected separately within the two CFHTLS fields are plotted together with the combined distribution using different colours. The red and purple solid lines show the best fit using the analytic template in Eq. (2) and the predicted V_max profile of the combined redshift distribution, respectively. The peculiar distribution of the VIPERS galaxy sample differs from the typical expectation from a magnitude-limited sample. This deviation is the result of the colour-colour preselection adopted to reject most galaxies located at z< 0.5.