The programme’s Interuniversity Academic Committee discourages theses that are a compendium of publications and, consequently, any such submission must adhere to the following criteria to be accepted:

The thesis should contain at least five articles or book chapters. They must all be of a quality equivalent to that required to obtain “sexenios” (six-year periods of externally assessed research activity) or similar, according to CNEAI criteria (the Spanish National Commission for the Evaluation of Research Activity). At least one of them should have been published abroad.

The articles must be linked, and this must be demonstrated in the introduction and the conclusions. These two sections must be unpublished and their combined length must be at least 80 pages.

Articles with several signatories will not be accepted, unless it can be proven that the doctoral student was the principal author, and the other authors confirm this. The same article may not be used for multiple compendium theses: if the other authors are not doctors, they must expressly waive their right to use the texts in the future.

The articles included in the thesis will not be eligible for the extraordinary doctorate award or to apply for post-doctorate scholarships that require at least two articles meeting CNEAI (the Spanish National Commission for the Evaluation of Research Activity) criteria. Using the same article as part of the thesis and as a product derived from it is regarded as fraudulent.

The articles must have been published during the five years previous to the thesis submission.

Should this type of thesis be submitted, it will have to be approved by the Interuniversity Committee, instead of delegating this function to the internal committee of each university, which is the case with normal theses.

These criteria will be applied without prejudice to any further regulations established by each University or other higher-ranking standards, which will be strictly complied with in their respective fields of application.