For having an excellent doctoral programme, there is no doubt that one of the keys is to implement the necessary mechanisms to ensure that the management and supervision of the research carried out within the programme is effective and of quality.

The regulatory Instruction of the Doctoral Studies approved by the university for the implementation of RD 99/2011 and the “documentary commitment of supervision” that subscribes the doctoral student, his/her thesis supervisor and the university itself, regulate the supervisory regime of the doctoral thesis and stand as reference and guide of good practices.
Several lines of action are clearly defined by the implementation of the Royal Decree:

• Establishment of curricular requirements for the director, in regard to postdoctoral experience, prestigious publications and the work in projects or research contracts.
• Establishment of limits when managing different thesis simultaneously
• Monitoring of the supervision plan and obligations and rights of the director and of the doctoral student. Choice of alternative monitors for the supervision and assessment of the research work and registry of activities of each student.
• Possibility of doing co-supervisions of thesis.
• Encouragement of the research autonomy of the doctoral student.
• Possibility of doing co-tutelary thesis by foreign prestigious centres which are reflected by the stay in the alternative institution.

In the libraries and bookstores there are manuals about how to do a thesis, but there are no similar materials that instruct professors about how to direct them. This absence is explained, above all, because it is presumed that every university professor , who have make at least one thesis can supervise the thesis of others; but this assumption does not always conform to the facts.

In order to get that the thesis supervisors do their work properly, within this doctoral programme a guide of good practices has been developed, which everyone should know and consult regularly.

This guide collects both aspects purely descriptive of the work of the supervisors and psychological aspects, that also play an important role when ensuring the student success in the development of his/her doctoral thesis. Although the purpose of the guide is to instruct the supervisor, it also includes aspects related to the tasks and obligations of the students in terms of their relationship with the supervisor.

NOTE: This guide of good practices is taken from the doctoral programme of the UV “Tecnologías de la Información, Comunicación y Matemática Computacional” (Information technologies, Communications and Computational Mathematics) with illustrative purposes for this prototype. The author is Rafael J. Martínez Durá.