“The thesis, not included the introductory part, should normally respond to three articles of normal size with the candidate as the sole author. If there are co-authors of one or more articles, there may be reason to expand the number of articles, so that the candidate’s independent contribution of extensive efforts is evident. It is a prerequisite for consideration of a doctoral thesis that the candidate is the main author and has extensive professional responsibility for a majority of the articles included in the thesis.”
The clarification states:
1. An article-based thesis shall consist of at least three papers in a format corresponding to that of standard articles in typical international academic journals in Economics.
2. If one of the papers is larger in scale or scope than a typical journal article, the other papers may be correspondingly smaller.
3. At least one of the papers shall be single-authored. This paper shall be of full scale and scope.
4. Normally, if one paper has more than one co-author, or more than one of the papers have co-author(s), then the thesis shall consist of more than three papers.
5. Normally, the thesis shall not consist of more than four papers.
6. Normally, taking the number of co-authors of each paper and summing these over all papers, the total shall not exceed six