Submission and assessment

You apply to the department to have your thesis assessed no later than 12 weeks before the planned public defence. If you submit between 20 June and 15 August, you must add four extra weeks due to the holiday period. If you submit between 10 December and 4 January, you must add two extra weeks.

Apply for assessment

Together with the application, you submit a digital version of the thesis, and a co-author statement (for an article-based thesis) or a supervisor statement signed by your main supervisor (for a monograph). The training component must be approved before you can apply for assessment.

Once the thesis and application have been submitted to the department, the thesis is considered submitted. You cannot then withdraw it until a decision has been made on whether it is worthy of being defended for the PhD degree.

The thesis must be assessed exactly as submitted. You send the thesis digitally, together with a completed application form, to the PhD coordinator at your department. Follow the template for layout and structure at avhandling.uib.no.

Contact the PhD coordinator at your department for the application form and questions about submission:

• Department of Physics and Technology: phd.ift@uib.no
• Department of Mathematics: phd.math@uib.no
• Department of Informatics: phd.ii@uib.no
• Department of Chemistry: submission.phd.kj@uib.no
• Department of Biological Sciences: submission.phd.bio@uib.no
• Geophysical Institute: phd.gfi@uib.no
• Department of Earth Science: submission.phd@geo.uib.no

The department sends a proposal for an assessment committee to the faculty no later than 10 weeks before the planned public defence. The faculty appoints the committee no later than 9 weeks before the defence, and you are informed of the proposed composition. You have five working days to submit written comments.

The committee must have at least three members: one internal committee chair and two external, equal opponents. At least one member should normally come from a foreign institution, and both genders should normally be represented among the opponents. All members must hold a doctoral degree or equivalent competence.

The committee chair administers the work of the committee, takes part in assessing the thesis, and makes sure that the opponents are informed about the Norwegian scheme for assessing doctoral theses and about the deadlines in the process.

Opponents and the committee chair normally cannot have ongoing publication collaboration or other collaboration with you or the supervisory committee within the last three years, in order to be considered impartial. The department obtains a declaration of impartiality from the proposed committee members before appointment.

The recommendation weighs the strengths and the weaknesses of the thesis, and concludes whether the qualitative and quantitative scientific requirements for a Norwegian doctoral degree have been met.

The committee gives particular weight to whether the thesis is an independent and comprehensive scientific work of a high academic standard. It assesses the research questions, the methodological, theoretical and empirical basis, the documentation, the treatment of the literature and the form of presentation. The committee considers whether the material and the methods are relevant to the questions you raise, and whether your arguments and conclusions hold. The thesis must contribute new knowledge to the field, and be of a standard that would allow it to be published as part of the scientific literature in the field.

For an article-based thesis, the committee also assesses whether the individual articles form a coherent whole. The synopsis must not only summarize the articles, but also compare the research questions and the conclusions of the separate works.

The chair of the committee administers the work on the recommendation. The committee submits a joint, reasoned recommendation within five weeks of receiving the thesis, and no later than four weeks before the planned public defence. The recommendation must state a clear joint conclusion, and must be signed by all three members. The committee cannot approve the thesis on the condition that you make changes to it.

If the members disagree, the grounds for the dissent must be stated. Individual statements from the opponents may be enclosed with the recommendation, also when the conclusion is unanimous.

The department sends the recommendation to the faculty and to you. You have a deadline of ten working days to submit written comments on it. The faculty then decides whether the thesis can be defended, based on the committee's recommendation.

The recommendation ends in one of three conclusions.

The thesis is worthy of being defended without changes

The thesis is an independent and comprehensive scientific work of international standard, and you meet the minimum requirements for research competence. The thesis may still have weaknesses, but they are of a kind that can be discussed in the public defence without being corrected in the thesis.

The thesis has minor shortcomings that should be corrected before the defence

The thesis is not yet worthy of defence, but the committee finds that minor revisions can bring it up to a satisfactory level. The revision cannot be more extensive than what you can complete within three months. The committee must give written and concrete guidance on which parts of the thesis need work – for example the methodology, the relationship between material and conclusion, the use of concepts, the clarity of the research questions, the treatment of data, or reference errors. The guidance is not a guarantee that the thesis will be approved.

You submit a revised thesis within three months. The revised thesis may also contain other changes than the ones the committee pointed out. The committee then reassesses the thesis and gives its final recommendation within four weeks of the new submission.

The thesis is not worthy of being defended

If the thesis needs more profound changes to theory, hypothesis, material, method or analysis, the committee recommends rejection. The recommendation must then give detailed reasons for the decision, and indicate which parts of the thesis need revision. A rejected thesis can be submitted in a revised version no earlier than six months later, and you only get one further opportunity for reassessment.

Once you have received the recommendation, you can apply to correct formal errors in the thesis – such as spelling mistakes, incorrect punctuation, reference errors, page layout and text formatting. The deadline is one week after you receive the recommendation.

You cannot make changes that affect the academic content, or that make the text more precise or meaningful than the original. Changes to tables are not approved as errata. The errata list is inserted into the printed thesis, but is not sent to the assessment committee.

Errata application

The thesis must be made publicly available no later than two weeks before the public defence.

No later than three weeks before the public defence, you must, in consultation with your supervisor, draft a press release in Norwegian. The department quality-assures the content before the press release is sent to the faculty, which is responsible for publishing it no later than two weeks before the defence. You may also submit a press release in English if you wish.