Quality Criteria

GENERAL REGULATIONS

In accordance with article 19.1 of the Doctoral Regulations of the University of Malaga,

    "The Academic Commissopm of each Doctoral Programmes will establish, with the approval of the Doctoral School to which the programme belongs and the Postgraduate Committee, minimum quality criteria for a doctoral thesis to begin the assessment and defence process".

 

The Postgraduate Commission agreed that these criteria should be public and be published on the programme's website. Likewise, the aforementioned article 19.1 states that:

• "In general, and respecting the modes of operation in the different branches of knowledge, it must be required that, during the process of preparing the doctoral thesis, the doctoral student has generated quality contributions directly related to their thesis work, whose total score is equal to or greater than 1 point according to the criteria used by the National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA) when evaluating Doctoral Programmes with a Mention of Excellence. These publications are the ones that endorse the thesis work".

 

As this is an inter-university programme, the minimum requirements to be met by the doctoral thesis in order to proceed to its deposit and subsequent defence are shared by the three participating universities. They were established as minimum requirements by the Academic Committee of the Doctoral Programme, to guarantee the quality of its doctoral theses, at its meeting of 17/09/2019, and they are:

 (1) For doctoral theses presented as a dissertations:

1.   To have presented a paper at an international scientific meeting. The doctoral student must be the speaker and must appear in first place in the authorship of the contribution, or in second place if the first place corresponds to the thesis supervisor.
2.  To have published (or have had accepted for publication) part of the results of the thesis in at least one article in an indexed scientific journal (Journal Citation Reports - Science Citation Index) classified in the first tercile of its speciality/category. The doctoral student must be listed as the first author of the publication, or the second if the thesis supervisor is the first author.

(2) For doctoral theses presented as a compendium of articles, the following is required:

1. At least three articles published or accepted in journals included in one of the first three quartiles of the list of journals in the field of the speciality and referenced in the latest list published by the Journal Citation Reports. A report with the impact factor of the publications submitted must be included.
2. The articles submitted must not have been used to justify the defence of any previous thesis. If the publication has been made by more than one author, the declaration of the other authors must be attached, stating that they have not presented the publication in another thesis and that they have renounced to do so.

The high impact international journals taken into consideration in this Programme are all those journals placed in the first or, exceptionally, in the upper part of the second quartile, in the categories of "Oceanography", "Environmental Science" and "Geoscience". In any case, the following journals will be considered for high impact purposes:

• Journal of Geophysical Research
• Journal of Physical Oceanography
• Biogeoscience
• Fisheries Oceanography
  
• Deep Sea Research
• Continental Shelf Research
• Journal of Marine Systems
• Progress in Oceanography
• Journal of Sea Research
• Global and Planetary Changes
• Climate Dynamics