Plataforma Sucupira is the official CAPES system for collecting and evaluating data from Brazil’s stricto sensu graduate programmes (master’s and doctoral). If you have been sent to two different addresses — sucupira.capes.gov.br and sucupira-legado.capes.gov.br — and cannot tell which one you need, that split is explained first below, because resolving it is the most useful thing this page can do.
Sucupira vs. Sucupira-Legado: which one do you need?
sucupira.capes.gov.br is the current platform. It is where active programas de pós-graduação (graduate programmes) carry out day-to-day tasks: consolidating Coleta de Dados (data collection), submitting new-programme proposals (APCN), and managing student and faculty records for the ongoing evaluation cycle.
sucupira-legado.capes.gov.br (“legado” = legacy) is the older interface. CAPES has been migrating Sucupira’s functions onto the current platform in stages, and some consultation and lookup tools — including public queries against past evaluation cycles (for example, closed Avaliação Quadrienal records) and some of the Qualis Periódicos classification lookups — have not yet been migrated and remain reachable only through the legacy address. If a link you have from a university, a CAPES notice, or an older bookmark points at sucupira-legado, that is usually because it leads to one of these not-yet-migrated consultation tools, not because it is the wrong system entirely.
In practice: for anything you are actively submitting or managing as a coordinator or institutional user, use sucupira.capes.gov.br. If you are only looking up a past record, an old cycle’s evaluation outcome, or a Qualis stratum and the current platform does not have it, try the legado address before assuming the record does not exist.
What is Plataforma Sucupira?
Plataforma Sucupira is maintained by CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior), the Brazilian Ministry of Education body responsible for evaluating and expanding graduate education in Brazil. The platform is the operational backbone of the Sistema Nacional de Pós-Graduação (SNPG), Brazil’s national graduate-education system: it is where CAPES collects the information it needs to evaluate every accredited master’s and doctoral programme in the country, and where it publishes the results of that evaluation back out.
The platform unifies several functions that used to run as separate CAPES systems, including:
- Coleta de Dados — the periodic data-collection module described below.
- APCN (Aplicativo para Propostas de Cursos Novos) — the application used to propose a brand-new graduate programme for CAPES accreditation.
- Avaliação — the evaluation module, where CAPES area committees (comissões de área) score programmes and where programme grades are published.
- Cadastro Discente — student registration and enrolment records.
Before this consolidation, these ran under the older name “Coleta CAPES”; Sucupira is the platform that replaced and unified them.
Who has to submit data, and who logs in
Submission is not optional for an accredited programme: every stricto sensu graduate programme within the SNPG is required to report its activity through Sucupira as a condition of remaining accredited. Two broad categories of user interact with the system:
- Programme coordinator (coordenador de programa) — the faculty member formally responsible for the graduate programme. The coordinator (or a delegate acting on the coordinator’s login) is responsible for reviewing and consolidating the programme’s data before each submission deadline.
- Institutional user (usuário institucional / IES) — a user tied to the sponsoring university or research institution (Instituição de Ensino Superior), typically in the graduate dean’s office (pró-reitoria de pós-graduação), who has visibility across all of that institution’s programmes rather than just one.
Faculty members and students generally do not log into Sucupira directly to enter their own records; their production and enrolment data is consolidated into the platform by the coordinator or an administrative delegate, drawing on records the researcher maintains elsewhere (most commonly their Currículo Lattes, the standard Brazilian academic CV record).
The Coleta de Dados cycle: what a programme reports
Coleta de Dados (“data collection”) is the module through which CAPES gathers the information underlying its evaluation. It runs on an annual submission window set by CAPES, during which each programme’s coordinator consolidates the previous year’s activity. What gets reported centers on four broad categories:
- Intellectual production — articles, books, book chapters, and other scholarly output attributed to the programme’s faculty and students, for the reporting year.
- Faculty (corpo docente) — who is affiliated with the programme, in what capacity (permanent, collaborating, or visiting faculty), and their supervision load.
- Students (discentes) — enrolment, progress, and, where applicable, completions.
- Theses and dissertations — completed master’s dissertations and doctoral theses produced by the programme, including their metadata.
Once a submission window closes, CAPES’s area committees use the consolidated data as the evidentiary basis for evaluation — Sucupira is the system of record, not just a reporting formality.
How Sucupira data feeds the CAPES evaluation
CAPES periodically evaluates every accredited graduate programme and assigns each one a grade, most visibly through the Avaliação Quadrienal (quadrennial evaluation) that closes out each four-year cycle, supplemented by lighter interim monitoring. The data a programme has consolidated in Sucupira over the cycle — its faculty roster, its students, and above all its intellectual production — is the primary evidence CAPES’s area committees draw on to arrive at that grade.
The grade matters beyond prestige: a programme’s grade determines its continued accreditation and its eligibility for CAPES funding (including scholarships), and programmes that fall persistently short of the required standard can lose their authorization to enrol new students. Because of that link, accurate and timely Coleta de Dados submission is not an administrative afterthought for a programme coordinator — it is the record the programme will be judged on.
Qualis Periódicos, the journal-classification system that scores where a programme’s article output was published, is evaluated in the same context: it is one of the inputs CAPES’s area committees weigh when scoring a programme’s intellectual production. See our companion guide on Qualis Periódicos strata for how that classification works and how it is looked up.
Common points of confusion
- “Coleta CAPES” and “Plataforma Sucupira” are not two different systems. Coleta CAPES was the predecessor; its data-collection function is now the Coleta de Dados module inside Sucupira.
- A login problem is often an institutional-access problem, not a personal-account problem. Because coordinator and institutional accounts are tied to a specific programme or institution record inside the SNPG, access issues are frequently resolved through the sponsoring university’s graduate dean’s office rather than directly with CAPES.
- Not finding a record on the current platform does not mean it does not exist — check whether it is a past-cycle record that only migrated as far as sucupira-legado.
Frequently asked questions
What is Plataforma Sucupira?
It is CAPES’s system for collecting, managing, and evaluating data on Brazil’s stricto sensu (master’s and doctoral) graduate programmes, hosted at sucupira.capes.gov.br.
What is the difference between sucupira.capes.gov.br and sucupira-legado.capes.gov.br?
sucupira.capes.gov.br is the current, actively used platform. sucupira-legado.capes.gov.br is the older interface, still used for some consultation and lookup functions — mainly access to past evaluation-cycle records — that had not yet been migrated to the current platform.
Who has to submit data through Sucupira?
Every graduate programme accredited within Brazil’s Sistema Nacional de Pós-Graduação must report its activity through Sucupira as a condition of maintaining that accreditation. In practice, the programme coordinator (or a delegate) consolidates and submits the data.
What is Coleta de Dados?
Coleta de Dados is the Sucupira module through which programmes report their annual activity — intellectual production, faculty, students, and completed theses/dissertations — that CAPES then uses in its evaluation.
How does Sucupira relate to Qualis Periódicos?
Qualis Periódicos classifies the journals where a programme’s article output appeared, and that classification is one of the inputs CAPES’s area committees weigh when they evaluate a programme’s intellectual production inside the broader evaluation cycle that Sucupira data feeds. See our Qualis Periódicos guide for the strata themselves.
Does a low Sucupira/CAPES evaluation grade have real consequences?
Yes. A programme’s CAPES grade affects its continued accreditation and its eligibility for CAPES funding and scholarships; programmes that persistently fall short of the required standard risk losing authorization to enrol new students.
For the broader accreditation and scholarship context this evaluation sits inside, see our guide to CAPES graduate accreditation, Qualis, and scholarships. For how CASRAI organizes national and multinational research-funding bodies more broadly, see the Grants Management & Research Funding hub.
