FOR ELIGIBILITY TO ENTER THE PHD THESIS DEFENSE
In accordance with the University Senate decision dated February 5, 2026, and numbered 2026/2-1, effective as of the Spring Semester of the 2025–2026 Academic Year, students who have not yet passed the doctoral qualifying stage must fulfill the attached minimum publication requirement to be eligible to defend their PhD thesis. Students who have reached the thesis defense stage but have not yet met this publication requirement are entitled to a leave of absence (registration freeze) to allow them to fulfill the condition. This leave is granted by the relevant Institute Executive Board for one semester at a time, up to a maximum of four semesters. In order to be eligible to enter the PhD thesis defense, students must fulfill at least one of the following activities related to their doctoral field of study or thesis research:
- An article published or accepted for publication in a journal indexed in WoS or Scopus
- Publication of a book or book chapter indexed by WoS or Scopus (excluding those consisting of conference proceedings)
- A full-text paper presented at a conference ranked within the top 100 overall or top 20 in its subfield according to the h5-index rankings published by Google Scholar Metrics
- A nationally or internationally registered patent, or a patent application that has received a positive PCT report
- A full-text paper presented at an international congress indexed by WoS or Scopus, or at an international congress that has been organized at least 10 times
Relevant Institute Departments may introduce additional requirements to the minimum conditions listed above. Implementation procedures and ethical codes are determined by the respective Institute Boards.