Best Ways to Remove Plagiarism

“Plagiarism is nothing but just a fear of blank page.” That quote captures something real about how most students end up here. You are staring at an empty document, deadline closing in, and the easiest path is to pull from existing sources — sometimes without realising how much of it ends up verbatim in the draft. But did you actually stop to think about how to remove plagiarism before submitting? Most scholars don’t. Not until it is too late.

The reality is, genuinely plagiarism-free content is harder to produce than most scholars expect. Plagiarism means presenting someone else’s data, work, or ideas, published or unpublished, as your own. Most Indian universities take this seriously now. Under the UGC Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism Regulations 2018, strictly enforced since 2025 and mandated across virtually all centrally affiliated universities through 2026, all thesis and dissertation submissions must meet prescribed similarity thresholds before the degree is awarded. Missing that threshold does not just delay your viva. In several institutions, it triggers a full six-month resubmission cycle.

Here are the most practical and honest ways to reduce plagiarism in your thesis or research paper.

UGC Similarity Thresholds: What the Levels Actually Mean

Before choosing a correction approach, know exactly which level your submission falls into. The UGC Regulations 2018 classify thesis similarity into four bands, and each carries a different consequence:

• Level 0 (below 10%): Accepted without any revision requirement. Proceed directly to submission.
• Level A (10–40%): Revise and resubmit within six months. No further penalty beyond the delay, but the clock starts the moment the report is issued.
• Level B (40–60%): Registration suspended for one year. Thesis must be substantially revised before you are permitted to resubmit.
• Level C (above 60%): Registration may be cancelled. This is the most serious outcome and very difficult to reverse.

These thresholds apply to the main body text only: your references, bibliography, and clearly marked direct quotations are excluded from the similarity calculation. In 2026, several universities including Delhi University, Savitribai Phule Pune University, and Anna University have introduced mandatory automated pre-submission checks through Shodhganga before a viva date is confirmed. Your level determines which approach to prioritise. Level A is usually manageable with targeted rewriting. Level B or C, on the other hand, typically means working with a professional editor — and doing the needful sooner rather than later.

Create Your Own Ideas

The single most effective way to remove plagiarism is to write from your own understanding. Not from the source. If you have genuinely read and absorbed your material, write what you understood, not what the source said. This sounds obvious. But most PhD scholars in India spend months reading, then sit down and essentially paraphrase what they just read. That habit is the root cause of most plagiarism problems in thesis chapters. Try this: close the source document before writing a section. What you recall from memory is, by definition, already in your own words. (It also tends to produce cleaner, tighter prose — a side benefit most scholars do not expect.)

Consult with Your Guide

Talk to your supervisor before you start writing, not after you receive your Turnitin report. Most thesis guides in Indian universities have seen dozens of plagiarism cases and can tell you, chapter by chapter, which sections are likely to be flagged. They can also advise on acceptable similarity ranges — what Mumbai University permits is not always the same as what DU or Anna University expects. Raise it early. Supervisors respond far better when you come to them before submission week than when you arrive at their door with a problem report in hand. (Most supervisors will actually appreciate the heads-up — it is far less awkward than the alternative.)

Citation — and the Shodhganga Factor

Citation is how you give proper credit to the original author. It includes the author’s name, publication year, journal name, DOI, and other reference details. In Indian research, the most commonly required formats are American Psychological Association (APA 7th edition), Modern Language Association (MLA), and Chicago/Turabian style — your department specifies which applies. One common misconception worth clearing up: proper citation reduces your similarity score in some sections, but it does not automatically resolve plagiarism if the underlying text is still copied word-for-word. You need to genuinely paraphrase first, then cite. In that order.

A point that many Indian PhD scholars overlook: your thesis is compared against Shodhganga, the INFLIBNET national repository where all Indian universities are required to deposit completed theses. This means your similarity check does not only match against published international journals. It also compares your work against every PhD thesis submitted in India since 2009. Regional studies, vernacular-language chapters, and obscure institutional submissions all form part of that database. Proper paraphrasing and full attribution matter doubly in this context.

Online Tools to Check and Remove Plagiarism

Several online tools help you identify problem passages before submission. Running a pre-check on your draft using Turnitin, Drillbit, or iThenticate gives you a realistic picture of where you actually stand. One critical development in 2026: Turnitin now flags AI-generated content alongside traditional plagiarism, and the UGC has formally advised Indian universities to treat AI-generated content in thesis submissions as equivalent to academic misconduct. If your draft was substantially assisted by an AI writing tool, that will surface in the report. Enforcement varies by institution, but the direction is clear, and it is moving toward stricter, not looser, scrutiny through 2026.

No automated spinning or paraphrasing tool can substitute for genuine rewriting. These tools can shuffle surface wording, but Turnitin’s algorithm analyses sentence-level structure. Synonym-swapping is simply not enough.

By Using Vocabulary

Replacing words with synonyms is the method most students try first. It helps at the margins. The problem is that Turnitin’s analysis goes well beyond individual word choices — it looks at sentence structure and semantic patterns to detect paraphrased or restructured content. Replacing “analyse” with “examine” throughout a paragraph will not reliably bring your similarity index down. What actually works is re-expressing the idea in your own sentence structure, not just swapping vocabulary one term at a time.

Rearranging the Order of the Words

Shuffling the order of words in a sentence is sometimes suggested as a quick fix. In practice, it rarely works. Sophisticated detection tools analyse sentence-level patterns, and rearranged text often still matches source material in a Turnitin report. The resulting writing also tends to read awkwardly; if you rely on structural shuffling across an entire thesis, your examiner may notice the incoherence before the similarity report even comes back. Beyond detection, this approach does nothing for your actual writing ability.

In practice, some of these methods work better than others depending on which chapter you are dealing with — but the common thread across all of them is genuine rewriting, not surface-level fixes. For thesis submissions where the similarity index is high and the deadline is close, working with experienced editors makes a real difference. Our team at Research Experts specialises in plagiarism removal for PhD theses — we work with Indian scholars to bring their similarity score within their university’s required threshold without compromising the integrity of the original research.