The external review of a doctoral thesis involves the following steps:
1) The student uploads the documentation to the EIDUS platform (instructions in https://doctorado.us.es/en/studies/phd-thesis/submission).
2) The tutor and supervisors approve the documentation in step 1.
3) The Academic Committee (AC) requests two reports from two external experts outside the University of Seville (they may belong to institutions in Spain) regarding the thesis. The experts have two months to submit the reports, which may include requests for changes or improvements to the doctoral thesis. If the thesis is applying for an international mention, these two reports coincide with those required for the international mention, and therefore must come from institutions outside Spain (they cannot have supervised the stay claimed for the international mention).
4) Once the reports are received, the AC:
a) either approves the deposit,
b) or informs the doctoral candidate of the need for changes, to which the candidate must respond within one month. The candidate responds to the AC (not to the experts) regarding the comments/changes/etc. requested in the reports. Based on the reports and the candidate's response, the AC decides whether to approve the deposit of the thesis.
The AC agrees that the doctoral candidate’s tutors/supervisors will propose to the AC the contacts of four external experts as potential reviewers of the thesis, to avoid delays in the process.
To prevent conflicts of interest:
- - In the case of theses by compendium of publications, co-authors of the articles used for the compilation of the thesis cannot be reviewers of the thesis.
- - In other cases, the AC will ask the doctoral candidate’s tutors/supervisors to confirm in their proposal that the proposed experts are not co-authors of the articles (published or preprints) related to the thesis content.
The coordinator will delegate to the AC member who has monitored the candidate’s progress in RAPI the task of requesting the reports and approving the deposit. A meeting of the AC will not be necessary when the reports do not propose changes or when the candidate’s response to the proposed changes is completely satisfactory. In that case, this AC member will inform the candidate by email, copying the coordinator, and will proceed to admit the thesis by the AC in the university’s application.