Get Professional Support for your Dissertation (2025)

Your dissertation similarity score just came back above the acceptable limit, and submission is weeks away. What does this actually mean under UGC regulations? How serious is it — and what should you do right now?

High similarity in dissertations is almost always explainable, and the UGC framework is clear about how your university must respond. More importantly, it is fixable. But only if you approach it correctly — software shortcuts will make things worse. Research Experts has worked with hundreds of Indian PhD and postgraduate students through exactly this situation, and this article covers what we consistently see go wrong and how to address it.

• Why Dissertation Plagiarism Problems Happen
• How Serious Is It? What UGC Regulations Require
• How to Fix It: Step-by-Step
• How to Prevent It Next Time
• Conclusion

Why Dissertation Plagiarism Problems Happen

High similarity in dissertations is almost never the result of deliberate copying. Most students who receive a high Turnitin score are genuinely surprised. That surprise is usually well-founded: the causes are predictable and largely unintentional.

Unintentional paraphrasing is the most common issue. When a student reads a source and immediately writes about the same idea, the phrasing often mirrors the original even without realising it. You know the idea came from elsewhere, but the language has not been genuinely reconstructed. Turnitin detects that as matching text regardless of intent.

Missing or incomplete citations are the second most frequent cause. A paraphrased idea with no citation is counted as plagiarism by similarity software — even if you never intended to present it as your own. In a dissertation of 60,000 to 90,000 words, a handful of citations can slip through during editing. It happens to careful students too.

Self-plagiarism catches many students off guard. If you have submitted a research proposal, conference abstract, journal article, or earlier chapter draft through Turnitin, reusing those passages in your dissertation flags as similarity — even though you wrote them. Most universities treat this as a violation of academic integrity unless you have explicitly disclosed it. This trips up students who have been prolific earlier in their programme — worth flagging to your supervisor before submission.

Literature review overload is specific to PhD dissertations. The lit review chapter tends to carry the highest similarity score because students lean heavily on existing sources, often quoting at length. Without a deliberate synthesis strategy, this chapter alone can push the overall score above 20 or 30 percent. If you have ever sat through a PhD viva where the examiner asks why the literature review reads like a summary of other people’s work, this is almost always why.

Time pressure amplifies all of the above. When students are working under a submission deadline, careful paraphrasing and citation discipline tend to slip. The result is a thesis that reads well but contains significant unattributed resemblance to source material.

How Serious Is It? What UGC Regulations Require

India’s UGC Regulations on Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions, 2018 apply to all universities, deemed universities, and institutions of national importance. Every HEI is required to implement these regulations, which means your institution’s response to a high similarity score is not discretionary. It follows a fixed framework.

The regulations define four levels based on similarity percentage:

• Level 0 — up to 10% similarity: No penalty. The dissertation is accepted as submitted.
• Level 1 — 10% to 40% similarity: The dissertation is returned to the student. You must submit a revised version within six months with the similarities removed. No academic penalty beyond the delay.
• Level 2 — 40% to 60% similarity: The student is debarred from resubmitting for one year. The dissertation is rejected. This can delay your degree award by more than twelve months.
• Level 3 — above 60% similarity: The most severe outcome. Registration may be cancelled entirely. Academic and departmental committees are required to convene.

Most Indian universities use Turnitin for post-submission checking, though some, particularly those affiliated with newer state universities, use Drillbit, which is calibrated specifically for Indian academic content. The similarity score excludes bibliography and quoted text in some institutional configurations, but not all, and the way UGC actually enforces this varies between universities. You need to know your institution’s specific settings before interpreting your score.

Beyond the formal penalties, a high similarity finding has practical consequences that are not written into the regulations. Your viva voce may be postponed. Scholarship or fellowship payments may be withheld pending resolution. In many departments, even a Level 1 finding is reported to your guide and the departmental committee, creating pressure that the rulebook does not capture. The administrative process of resubmission adds cost and time that most students underestimate.

A similarity score above 10% is a solvable problem, but it requires the right approach. Software-based paraphrasing tools will not help and may make things worse. Manual professional support is the fastest route to a compliant dissertation.

How to Fix It: Step-by-Step

If your dissertation has come back with a similarity score above your institution’s threshold, here is the process that actually works.

Step 1 — Get a detailed Turnitin similarity report

Before making any changes, get the full similarity report with colour coding, not just the percentage. The report shows exactly which passages are flagged, which sources they match, and the match percentage per source. Without this, you are rewriting blindly. If your university does not share the detailed report with you automatically, request it in writing from your supervisor or the examination office.

Step 2 — Identify which chapters are driving the score

Similarity is almost never spread evenly across a dissertation. The literature review typically accounts for 60 to 70 percent of the total similarity. Methodology and theoretical framework sections follow. Results and discussion chapters tend to be low. Knowing which chapters need work saves significant time: focus the rewriting effort where it actually matters, not across the whole document.

Step 3 — Manually paraphrase flagged passages

This is the most important step, and the one where automated tools consistently fail. Do not use Quillbot, Spinbot, or any other paraphrasing software to rewrite flagged text. These tools change surface words while preserving sentence structure, and Turnitin’s detection identifies the result as machine-paraphrased. The output often performs worse on a recheck than the original — we see this consistently.

Manual paraphrasing means genuinely re-expressing an idea in your own words, from your own understanding of what the source is saying. Read the passage, close the source, and write about the same concept without looking at the original. Then cite the source you are drawing from. This is the only approach that reliably reduces similarity while preserving academic integrity. Our plagiarism removal service for PhD thesis uses experienced academic writers who do this work manually — it takes longer than software, but it passes verification.

Step 4 — Audit and correct every citation

Go through the dissertation chapter by chapter and verify that every paraphrase has a citation, every quotation has both quotation marks and a citation, and every reference in the text appears in the bibliography. Citation errors account for a large proportion of Level 1 findings. A professional citation formatting review catches errors across APA, MLA, Chicago, or whichever style your department requires.

Step 5 — Restructure the literature review

If your literature review contains long block quotations or extended passages closely paraphrased from single sources, this chapter needs restructuring — not just line-by-line editing. The goal is synthesis: instead of reporting what each paper said, explain what the body of literature collectively shows, and cite multiple sources per claim. This approach substantially reduces similarity while simultaneously improving the quality of the chapter. It is also, incidentally, what examiners want to read.

Step 6 — Run a pre-submission similarity check

After all revisions are complete, run a fresh Turnitin or Drillbit check before submitting the revised version to your institution. This confirms the score is within your university’s threshold and avoids a second return. Research Experts provides proofreading and a final Turnitin check as part of the revision package to ensure the resubmitted dissertation is clean on all counts.

How to Prevent It Next Time

If you are at an early stage of your dissertation, or supporting a junior colleague who is, these habits make high similarity far less likely at submission.

Cite as you write. Insert citations at the moment you use a source, not during an editing pass weeks later. When you paraphrase a paper, immediately add the citation in your preferred style. When you finish a chapter, verify that every idea drawn from a source has a citation before moving to the next one.

Use a citation manager. Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote all let you import sources, attach notes, and generate formatted references automatically. A citation manager prevents the scenario where you have the right idea but can no longer locate the original source at reference-list stage. It also formats citations consistently, which reduces the kind of style errors that a professional citation formatter needs to correct later.

Paraphrase in real time. After reading a source, close it before writing. Write your paraphrase from memory and understanding, then return to the source only to check accuracy and add the citation. This technique, sometimes called the “read, cover, recall, check” method, is the single most reliable way to produce original text from secondary sources. It feels slow at first. It is not, compared to the alternative.

Run chapter-level similarity checks. Do not wait until the full dissertation is complete. Run a Turnitin or Drillbit check at the end of each chapter. Catching a high-similarity chapter at draft stage takes an hour to fix; catching it at submission takes weeks.

Know your university’s exclusion settings. Some universities configure their similarity software to exclude bibliography, short phrases under a certain word count, and direct quotations. Understanding these settings tells you how to interpret your chapter scores accurately and where to focus your revision effort.

Conclusion

A high dissertation similarity score is a serious finding under UGC regulations — but it is a solvable one. Understand exactly where the similarity is coming from before making any changes. Manual paraphrasing is the only approach that reliably passes a Turnitin recheck. And citation correction alongside literature review restructuring addresses the root cause, not just the surface symptoms.

If your dissertation has come back above the acceptable threshold and your resubmission deadline is approaching, our plagiarism removal team can review the similarity report, apply manual paraphrasing to flagged passages, correct citation errors, and run a final Turnitin check before you resubmit. Get in touch to discuss your timeline and get a clear plan for bringing your dissertation within limits.