CAPES — the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel) — is the Brazilian federal agency responsible for accrediting and evaluating graduate programs and for administering graduate-level scholarships, including Brazil’s main programs for international academic mobility. For a research administrator or international researcher assessing a Brazilian graduate program, a potential collaboration, or a scholarship route into or out of Brazil, this guide covers what CAPES actually does, how its quality-assessment system (Qualis) works, its main scholarship and mobility programs, and — critically — how it differs from CNPq, Brazil’s other major federal science agency, with which it is routinely and incorrectly conflated.
What CAPES Is
CAPES is a public foundation (fundação pública) linked to Brazil’s Ministry of Education (MEC). It was created in 1951, originally as the Campanha Nacional de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, and took its current name and structure through subsequent reorganizations, including its establishment as a foundation under Law No. 11.502/2007. Its core statutory mission is to expand and consolidate graduate education (pós-graduação stricto sensu — master’s and doctoral programs) across Brazil, which it carries out through three linked functions:
- Accreditation and evaluation of every master’s and doctoral program in the country, run on a periodic cycle through CAPES’s evaluation system for the Sistema Nacional de Pós-Graduação (SNPG, National Postgraduate System).
- Quality assessment of scholarly output through the Qualis system, which classifies the venues (primarily journals) where graduate programs’ faculty and students publish.
- Scholarships and mobility funding for graduate students and researchers, both within Brazil and for international placements, plus institutional support for internationalization.
None of these three functions is optional or separable in practice: a program’s CAPES evaluation score determines its continued accreditation (and therefore its legal authority to award degrees), directly affects how many CAPES-funded scholarships it receives, and feeds back into how its faculty’s publication record is assessed under Qualis. This is the single most important structural fact for an outside researcher to understand about CAPES — it is not simply a grant-making body sitting alongside CNPq; it is the gatekeeper for graduate program legitimacy in Brazil.
CAPES vs. CNPq: Two Different Federal Agencies
CAPES and CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico) are both major federal bodies in the Brazilian research system, and both offer scholarships, which is the main source of confusion. They are not interchangeable, and international collaborators, funders, and university international offices benefit from keeping the distinction clear:
- Parent ministry. CAPES sits under the Ministry of Education (MEC). CNPq sits under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI).
- Primary mandate. CAPES accredits and evaluates graduate programs and manages the scholarships tied to that system. CNPq funds research projects directly, across all fields, and administers Brazil’s national researcher productivity fellowship system.
- Unit of evaluation. CAPES evaluates institutions and their graduate programs as a whole (program-level accreditation). CNPq evaluates and funds individual research proposals and individual researchers (through its productivity fellowship, “Bolsa de Produtividade”).
- Signature system. CAPES runs Qualis, the journal/venue classification tied to graduate-program evaluation. CNPq runs the Lattes Platform, the standardized researcher CV and output database used system-wide in Brazil.
- Where they overlap. The two agencies jointly administer the Programa de Estudantes-Convênio de Pós-Graduação (PEC-PG), a scholarship route for foreign master’s and doctoral students from partner developing countries to study in Brazil, and, historically, jointly ran the large-scale Ciência sem Fronteiras (Science Without Borders) mobility program (2011–2017), now discontinued.
A useful shorthand: CNPq asks “is this research project or researcher worth funding?” CAPES asks “is this graduate program, and the training it provides, meeting the standard required to keep operating and to be internationally competitive?” A Brazilian state research foundation (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa, or FAP — the best known internationally being São Paulo’s FAPESP) is a third, independent layer again, operating at the state rather than federal level.
Graduate Program Evaluation and Accreditation
CAPES evaluates every master’s and doctoral program in Brazil on a periodic cycle — the Avaliação Quadrienal (Quadrennial Evaluation) — assigning each program a numeric score. A minimum score is required simply to remain accredited and continue awarding degrees; the highest scores are reserved for programs whose research output is judged internationally competitive in their field. This evaluation considers faculty research productivity, the training outcomes of graduates, program infrastructure, and the program’s contribution to its field and to Brazilian society, assessed by field-specific committees (“áreas de avaliação”) organized by CAPES.
The practical consequence for an outside institution or funder is that a program’s CAPES score is the standard reference point for judging its standing within Brazil — comparable in function, though not in methodology, to how national research assessment exercises (such as the UK’s REF) are used to benchmark departments elsewhere. A prospective collaborator, joint-degree partner, or scholarship-receiving institution outside Brazil evaluating a specific graduate program should ask for its current CAPES score as a first-order signal of program standing.
The Qualis System
Qualis (formally Qualis CAPES, sometimes Qualis Periódicos) is CAPES’s classification system for the venues — primarily academic journals, and in some fields also books, conference proceedings, and other outputs — where graduate program faculty and students publish. Introduced in 1998, it exists because publication quality norms vary substantially by field, so Qualis classifications are set separately within each of CAPES’s evaluation areas rather than as a single cross-disciplinary journal ranking; a journal’s Qualis standing in one field says nothing about its standing in another. Qualis results feed into the quadrennial program evaluation described above, since a program’s overall assessment reflects where its faculty and graduates have published.
For researchers outside Brazil, the practical relevance of Qualis is usually indirect: it explains why Brazilian co-authors or collaborating institutions may weight journal choice differently than researchers used to metrics like Journal Impact Factor or CiteScore alone — Qualis classification carries direct career and institutional consequences within the Brazilian system in a way that is more consequential, and more centrally administered, than most national journal-ranking schemes elsewhere.
Scholarships and International Mobility Programs
CAPES is also Brazil’s principal source of graduate scholarship funding, disbursed mainly through the institutions hosting accredited programs rather than directly to individual applicants in most cases. The main lines relevant to an international audience are:
- PROEX (Programa de Excelência Acadêmica) and PROAP (Programa de Apoio à Pós-Graduação) — institutional funding lines that provide scholarships and operating support to top-evaluated graduate programs at federal and other public/community institutions respectively, allocated according to a program’s CAPES evaluation score.
- PDSE (Programa de Doutorado Sanduíche no Exterior) — the “sandwich doctorate” program, funding Brazilian PhD candidates to spend a period of their doctorate at a partner institution abroad. This is a common entry point for foreign universities hosting a visiting Brazilian doctoral researcher.
- CAPES PrInt (Programa Institucional de Internacionalização) — an institutional-level internationalization program (launched 2018) that funds Brazilian universities’ own international mobility strategies, including bringing foreign researchers to Brazil and sending Brazilian researchers and doctoral students abroad, structured around each institution’s chosen priority research themes and partner-country strategy.
- PEC-PG (Programa de Estudantes-Convênio de Pós-Graduação) — run jointly with CNPq, offering full master’s and doctoral scholarships in Brazil to students from partner developing countries, primarily in Latin America and Africa.
CAPES also operates the Portal de Periódicos CAPES, a national electronic-journal and database subscription platform that gives faculty, students, and staff at participating Brazilian institutions access to international scholarly literature — functionally comparable to a national site license, and relevant to international publishers or database vendors negotiating institutional/consortium access in Brazil.
Why This Distinction Matters for International Research Administration
Getting CAPES and CNPq right matters beyond terminology accuracy. A funding agreement, MOU, or joint-scholarship arrangement drafted against the wrong Brazilian counterpart agency will misroute approvals: proposals for project-level research funding or productivity fellowships belong with CNPq; questions about a specific graduate program’s accreditation status, degree-granting authority, or program-level scholarship allocation belong with CAPES. Due-diligence checks on a prospective Brazilian graduate-program partner — verifying it is currently accredited and checking its most recent evaluation score — are a CAPES matter, not a CNPq one. International mobility scholarships for doctoral researchers most often run through CAPES (PDSE, PrInt) rather than CNPq, though CNPq maintains its own separate international-cooperation instruments as well.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CAPES a funding agency or an accreditation body?
Both, and the two functions are linked. CAPES accredits and evaluates every graduate program in Brazil, and it also distributes scholarship funding — but scholarship allocation to a given program is tied directly to that program’s evaluation score, so accreditation and funding are not separate tracks.
How is CAPES different from CNPq?
CAPES (Ministry of Education) accredits and evaluates graduate programs and funds graduate scholarships. CNPq (Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation) funds research projects directly and runs Brazil’s national researcher productivity fellowship system. See the comparison above for the full breakdown.
What is Qualis CAPES?
Qualis is CAPES’s field-specific classification of the journals and other venues where graduate-program faculty and students publish. It was introduced in 1998 and its results feed into each program’s periodic CAPES evaluation.
Can foreign researchers or institutions receive CAPES funding?
Yes, through specific programs: PEC-PG offers full degree scholarships in Brazil to foreign students from partner countries, and CAPES PrInt funds Brazilian institutions to host visiting foreign researchers as part of their internationalization strategy. Most other CAPES scholarship lines are allocated to Brazilian institutions and their students rather than to individual foreign applicants directly.
What does a CAPES evaluation score actually measure?
It measures a graduate program as a whole — faculty research output, graduate training outcomes, infrastructure, and field contribution — on a periodic (quadrennial) cycle, assessed against field-specific criteria set by CAPES evaluation committees. A minimum score is required for a program to keep operating.
This guide is part of CASRAI’s coverage of international research funding bodies. See also the CASRAI guide to CNPq and to FAPESP for the other two major layers of Brazil’s federal and state research funding landscape.
