The sintering process of compacts of nanostructured gadolinia-doped ceria was investigated by dilatometry and by construction of the master sintering curve. Corrections for the thermal expansion of the experimental setup and mass loss were proposed. The aim of this work was to investigate the sintering evolution of compacts constituted by a powder material with very high specific surface area and to verify the effectiveness of the proposed corrections for generating reliable density data. Validation of the obtained results was accomplished by comparison of corrected data with density values obtained for conventionally sintered compacts. Dilatometry experiments were carried out for 3, 6, 10 and 12 C min-1 heating rates. Good convergence of relative density curves calculated from corrected shrinkage data was obtained. The determined value of the activation energy for sintering of nanostructured gadolinia- doped ceria compacts is 576 kJ mol-1.