A PhD supervision meeting record is a short, agreed note of one formal meeting: when it was, who came, what progress was reported, what was decided, who does what by when, and any concern raised. Leeds, Newcastle and Queen's University Belfast require one for every formal meeting and set a minimum number of meetings a year; Leeds and Newcastle keep them in an online system confirmed by both sides. Practice elsewhere differs, and this guide names the differences.
EdCitation publishes this guide. On 26 September 2026 we read the rules of eight universities at source (Leeds, Newcastle, Queen's University Belfast, Manchester and UCL in the UK, Sydney and the Australian National University, and Penn State in the US) and what two UK sector bodies say. It is general information: your own university's code of practice is the rule that applies to you. How the supervisory relationship works day to day, and what each side owes, is in our guide to working with your supervisor.
EdCitation never writes anyone's meeting records or thesis. Its free tools work around them: Find sources finds the reading you bring, Cite a source references it, and Check your paper reads written instructions into a checklist. We ran all three and quote the results, faults included.
What do universities require you to record?
Most universities we read set a minimum number of formal meetings and name where the record lives; they differ on who writes it and how much is recorded.
| University | Formal meetings required | Who records, and where | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leeds | Full-time: at least 10 a year, no more than eight weeks apart; fewer for part-time (five to eight) | You or a supervisor, in GRAD; both must agree it is correct | University of Leeds (n.d.-b) |
| Newcastle | Full-time: at least 10 a year, no gap over eight weeks; at least three with each team member; one full-team meeting a year | You are advised to start it in NU Reflect; a supervisor confirms it | Newcastle University (n.d.) |
| Queen's University Belfast | 10 formal, recorded meetings a year (six part-time and writing-up) | The supervisory team makes sure records are kept | Queen's University Belfast (2025) |
| Manchester | At least monthly; all supervisors together twice a year; your advisor once a year | The main supervisor records attendance and monitors progress in the progression monitoring system | University of Manchester (2025) |
| UCL | Formal Supervisory Reviews at set points on a timeline, not every meeting | You fill in the Research Student Log; every supervisor signs it off | University College London (n.d.) |
| Sydney | Formal meetings "at least monthly, but usually more often" | Agreed between you; strongly recommended in RECS | University of Sydney (n.d.) |
| Australian National University | At least monthly with the primary supervisor; the panel at least twice a year | No meeting-record rule in the documents we read; the panel considers your Annual Report and Plan | Australian National University (2025a, 2025b) |
| Penn State | No number set; the committee meets "as necessary" | The committee approves a written annual assessment, kept by the programme | Pennsylvania State University (2019) |
Where the rules differ
Every meeting, or milestones only. Leeds, Newcastle and Queen's record every formal meeting. UCL's Log leaves out the frequent everyday meetings and records Formal Supervisory Reviews at key points, each reviewing progress against the objectives set last time. Penn State records one written assessment a year.
What counts. Leeds says plainly that emails are not meeting records, and that supervision cannot happen by email except in rare fieldwork cases. Newcastle defines a formal interaction as a structured meeting with a meaningful discussion, for example of a piece of work, ending in an agreed action plan.
Who can read it. At Newcastle only you and your supervisors see the notes and files, except in exceptional circumstances such as appeals or complaints; school and Graduate School staff see only the dates, venue and attendees.
Visas. Newcastle says student visa holders must record and confirm meeting outcomes as a condition of sponsorship, and that the Home Office may ask for them. Manchester's policy states the current UK Visas and Immigration requirement as monthly supervisor meetings, at least six of them in person in any twelve months. Check your own university's page before relying on either.
How fast. None of the eight sets a number of days for writing up or agreeing a record. Our suggestion is within two working days, while everyone remembers the meeting.
What the UK sector bodies say
The Quality Assurance Agency's advice on research degrees, published in November 2018 for the previous edition of the UK Quality Code, says both the student and the supervisors should record the outputs of supervisory meetings, and that a supervisor's record may cover objectives and progress, key feedback, areas of debate or disagreement, and concerns raised (Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, 2018). It also expects each university to set out its minimum contact between supervisors and students and the detailed requirements of progress reporting.
The UK Council for Graduate Education's framework says supervisors usually check at meetings whether targets were met, and may offer the records as evidence of it. It describes a formal review, usually 9 to 15 months in, that decides whether a student continues to the doctorate (UK Council for Graduate Education, n.d.).
What should a supervision meeting record contain?
A useful record says when, who, what was reported and decided, who does what by when, what worries anyone, and when you meet next. Leeds wants any problem that could affect your research or progress written down; Sydney's system logs decisions and goals; UCL's reviews record progress since the last one, objectives for the next period and the skills needed.
Keep it to one page in note form: a record, not supervision meeting minutes of every remark (the difference is in minutes, notes or an action log). Give each action one owner, a verb and a date, as in action items that get done.
Two things are often left out. Record a disagreement with both views in neutral words, as the QAA advice expects. And record what was not done: a missed action with its new date shows a panel that problems were noticed early.
A supervision meeting record template
This template is ours, not any university's form. If your university uses a system such as GRAD, NU Reflect or RECS, use its fields and treat ours as a checklist.
| Field | What to write |
|---|---|
| Meeting | Number in the year, date, start and end time, in person or online |
| Present | You and each supervisor by role; apologies |
| Purpose | One line: feedback on a draft, a decision, a progress check |
| Actions from last time | Each one: done, on track, late with a new date, or dropped with a reason |
| Progress since last meeting | Work finished, data collected, training done |
| Reading discussed | Each source as a full reference, made with Cite a source |
| Decisions | Numbered, one line each |
| Actions | Numbered: owner, what, by which date |
| Concerns | Anything that could affect progress, from either side |
| Disagreements | Both views, and how and when it will be settled |
| Next meeting | Date, time, place |
| Record | Written by, date sent; agreed by, date agreed |
A worked example (invented)
Invented to show the template filled in: Jordan Hale is a fictional second-year, full-time PhD student in public health, at a university requiring ten formal meetings a year.
- Meeting: 7 of 10 this year. 14 October 2026, 10:00 to 11:00, in person.
- Present: Jordan Hale (student), principal supervisor, co-supervisor. No apologies.
- Purpose: feedback on the chapter 2 draft; plan for data access.
- Actions from last time: 6.1 send chapter 2, sections 2.1 to 2.4: done, sent 30 September. 6.2 submit the data-access application: late; new date in 7.1.
- Reading discussed: Bobb, J. F., Obermeyer, Z., Wang, Y., & Dominici, F. (2014). Cause-specific risk of hospital admission related to extreme heat in older adults. JAMA, 312(24), 2659–2667. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2014.15715
- Decisions: 7.A Chapter 2 is organised by health outcome, not by country.
- Actions: 7.1 Jordan: submit the data-access application by 28 October 2026. 7.2 Co-supervisor: return comments on section 2.3 by 21 October 2026. 7.3 Jordan: write a one-page comparison of a systematic and a narrative review for chapter 2 by 4 November 2026.
- Concerns: Jordan's teaching is taking two days a week; workload to be reviewed at meeting 8.
- Disagreements: the co-supervisor prefers a systematic review for chapter 2; the principal supervisor and Jordan prefer a narrative review. To be decided at meeting 8, on the comparison in 7.3.
- Next meeting: 11 November 2026, 10:00, in person.
- Record: written by Jordan, sent 15 October 2026; agreed by both supervisors, 17 October 2026.
Only the reading is real: the reference came from a run of Cite a source, corrected as described below (Bobb et al., 2014).
How do meeting records feed your progress reviews?
Your records are the evidence behind every progress review, from the first confirmation of doctoral candidature to each annual review.
At Leeds, before the annual progress review you complete a form in GRAD that includes a reflective account of how the work has gone, problems included, and a timetable to completion; a report is written after the meeting and appears in GRAD (University of Leeds, n.d.-a). Queen's University Belfast (2025) has an independent panel review each student every year and gives the panel the previous review reports first. At UCL the Departmental Graduate Tutor confirms that the Log is complete at upgrade and again before thesis submission. Newcastle asks for a full-team meeting each year, normally before the annual review. Penn State's annual assessment reviews earlier ones, names concerns with actions, includes minority opinions and the student's own comments, and is acknowledged by the student (Pennsylvania State University, 2019).
Preparing for a review from your records
- Read every record since the last review, in order, before you write anything.
- List the actions: which were done, which were late and why, and which were dropped.
- Pull out every concern you recorded, and what was done about it. A problem recorded in March explains a delay in June.
- Check the dates against your plan, and update your timetable to completion.
- Check the reading and references in any chapter you submit: Verify references checks a list against the publishers' records, free.
- Read the review's own instructions for what to submit.
What if you disagree with the record or your supervisor?
Correct a wrong record before it is agreed; take a wider problem to the person your code names, then to formal procedures.
Disagreeing with the record
At Leeds both sides must agree a record is correct, so you can decline to agree one that is not. If a Newcastle supervisor does not confirm your records, raise it with them or the school office, then the Graduate School. On UCL's Log, a review can be edited with a reason until every supervisor signs, earlier versions staying visible; after that, only comments can be added. Our advice: never alter an agreed record quietly; add a dated comment, or record the correction at the next meeting.
When the problem is the supervision
Manchester asks both sides to try to resolve a breakdown together first, with mediation available; a formal request to change the supervisory team can follow, and every application, decision and outcome is recorded (University of Manchester, 2025). At Leeds you can meet the Director of Postgraduate Research Studies at any time, and are offered a meeting without your supervisors at least once a year. Sydney points you to your faculty's Associate Head, Research Education, and to the postgraduate association for confidential advice, and warns that changing lead supervisor can affect progression, scholarships and visas.
At providers in England and Wales, once internal procedures are finished, the Office of the Independent Adjudicator can take a complaint within 12 months of the Completion of Procedures Letter; it does not review academic judgement (Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education, n.d.). Queen's separates a complaint about service from an academic appeal against a progression decision. In every case, your agreed records are the evidence.
How EdCitation helps around supervision
EdCitation is the best tool for the reading side of supervision, because it looks each source up in the publisher's record; a chatbot composes references from memory, which is why AI tools invent references. It never writes a record or any part of a thesis. Our runs were on 26 September 2026.
Check your paper, on a code of practice. Check your paper is built for an assignment's instructions: word limits, headings, sources, style and format. We pasted the "How often should you meet?" and "Recording your meetings" sections of Leeds's supervision meetings page. The checklist came back empty. The tool set aside 11 lines as rules it could not test, among them "You must keep records of all formal supervision meetings in GRAD." Two of the 11 were not rules at all: the heading "How often should you meet?" and the lead-in "You need to have regular meetings with your supervisors:". Three sentences and two headings appeared in neither list, including "Supervision meetings cannot happen by email, except in rare cases when you're on fieldwork and there are no other options." Meeting rules are not what it tests: read your code yourself, with the table above as a guide.
Find sources, for the reading. Find sources searches about 300 million published works by topic or by claim. For "extreme heat and hospital admissions in older adults" it reported 2,277,576 results and returned 94. First was a 2025 small-area analysis in Greater Boston in Environmental Epidemiology; second, the 2014 JAMA paper by Bobb and colleagues; third, a 2026 preprint, worth flagging as such.
Cite a source, for the record. From the JAMA paper's DOI, Cite a source returned this APA 7 entry, with no retraction notice:
Bobb, J. F., Obermeyer, Z., Wang, Y., & Dominici, F. (2014). Cause-specific risk of hospital admission related to extreme heat in older adults. JAMA, 312(24), 2659–2667. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2014.15715
No fix is needed: the tool set the article title in sentence case, as APA 7 asks and as in our example.
All three are free with no account. References from a file checks every reference in an uploaded chapter and matches every in-text citation, three checks a month with a free account and no limit with Pro at $8 a month; see pricing.
Quick questions
How many supervision meetings does a PhD student need a year?
It depends on the university. Leeds, Newcastle and Queen's University Belfast require at least ten formal meetings a year for full-time students; Manchester, Sydney and ANU expect roughly monthly contact; Penn State sets no number.
Who writes the supervision meeting record?
Whoever your code names. Newcastle recommends the student and Leeds allows either side, with both agreeing it; at Manchester the main supervisor records attendance.
What should supervision meeting notes include?
The date, who attended, progress, decisions, actions with an owner and a date, concerns, disagreements and the next meeting, as in our template.
Do emails count as a supervision meeting record?
Not at Leeds, which says so outright and requires records in GRAD. Elsewhere, check your code; a record agreed in the university's system is the safe form.
Can EdCitation read my university's code of practice?
Check your paper will try, free, but on Leeds's supervision rules it returned no checklist items and set aside 11 lines. Read the code yourself; EdCitation never writes your records.
References
- Australian National University. (2025a). Procedure: Higher degree by research: Supervision (ANUP_012813). ANU Policy Library. https://policies.anu.edu.au/ppl/document/ANUP_012813
- Australian National University. (2025b). Guideline: Higher degree by research: University, candidate, and supervisor responsibilities (ANUP_012814). ANU Policy Library. https://policies.anu.edu.au/ppl/document/ANUP_012814
- Bobb, J. F., Obermeyer, Z., Wang, Y., & Dominici, F. (2014). Cause-specific risk of hospital admission related to extreme heat in older adults. JAMA, 312(24), 2659–2667. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2014.15715
- Newcastle University. (n.d.). Meeting records. Student Progress. https://www.ncl.ac.uk/student-progress/pgr/activities/meetings
- Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education. (n.d.). Can you complain to us? https://www.oiahe.org.uk/students/can-you-complain-to-us/
- Pennsylvania State University. (2019). GCAC-603 Ph.D. committee responsibilities: Research doctorate. J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox Graduate School. https://gradschool.psu.edu/graduate-education-policies/gcac/gcac-600/gcac-603-phd-committee-responsibilities/
- Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education. (2018). UK Quality Code for Higher Education: Advice and guidance: Research degrees. https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/quality-code/advice-and-guidance-research-degrees.pdf
- Queen's University Belfast. (2025). Code of practice for research degree programmes. Academic Affairs. https://www.qub.ac.uk/directorates/academic-services/AcademicAffairs/ResearchDegreeProgrammes/FileStore/Code%20of%20Practice%20for%20Research%20Degree%20Programmes%202025-26.pdf
- UK Council for Graduate Education. (n.d.). 6. Keeping the research on track and monitoring progress. Good Supervisory Practice Framework. https://supervision.ukcge.ac.uk/good-supervisory-practice-framework/6-keeping-the-research-on-tack-and-monitoring-progress
- University College London. (n.d.). UCL Research Student Log: Student quick reference guide. https://researchlog.grad.ucl.ac.uk/studentQRG.html
- University of Leeds. (n.d.-a). Annual progress review. https://students.leeds.ac.uk/postgraduate-research-during-your-research/doc/annual-progress-review
- University of Leeds. (n.d.-b). Supervision meetings. https://students.leeds.ac.uk/postgraduate-research-starting-research/doc/supervision-meetings
- University of Manchester. (2025). Supervision policy for postgraduate research degrees. http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=615
- University of Sydney. (n.d.). Candidature. Graduate research. https://www.sydney.edu.au/research/graduate-research/current-students/candidature.html