The plagiarism limit for a PhD thesis in India is 10% similarity, which the UGC 2018 regulations treat as Level 0 with no penalty. Every PhD scholar hears this as “keep it under 10%”. That figure is right only. But the regulation spends most of its words on which text gets counted. Many scholars get tensed seeing the raw score, before any filters are put.
In this guide we go through what the UGC (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations, 2018 actually say. We read it from the Gazette notification itself. You will find the four levels, the penalties for theses and for publications, the exclusions, and how each university adds its own rules over the UGC ones. We also explain how to read a DrillBit, Turnitin or Ouriginal report without fooling yourself either way.
What the UGC 2018 plagiarism regulations say
UGC notified these Regulations on 23 July 2018. They came in the Gazette of India on 31 July 2018. They apply to students, faculty, researchers and staff of all higher educational institutions in the country. They deal with “scripts”, meaning a research paper, thesis, dissertation, book chapter or book that is submitted for a Master’s or research-level degree, or sent for publication.
Many of the duties here are on the university and not on the scholar. As per Regulation 6, every university has to adopt a technology-based system for checking. It has to frame a plagiarism policy, get it approved by its statutory bodies and put it up on the website. Along with each thesis, the university must also collect two documents. One is an undertaking from the scholar saying the work is original and was checked with a tool approved by the university. The other is a certificate from the supervisor saying the work is plagiarism free. Once the degree is awarded, the thesis has to go to Shodhganga, the INFLIBNET repository, within one month. This matters later, because open-access theses like the ones on Shodhganga can be among the material that checkers compare your text against.
The four levels and the penalties for a thesis
Regulation 8 divides plagiarism into four levels based on the similarity percentage. After that, Regulation 12.1 gives a penalty for each level in the case of theses and dissertations. The percentages are copied as the regulation writes them. The penalties are in our own words, kept close to the text.
| Level | Similarity | Penalty for a thesis or dissertation (Reg. 12.1) |
|---|---|---|
| Level 0 | Up to 10% | Minor similarities. No penalty. |
| Level 1 | Above 10% to 40% | The student has to submit a revised script within a stipulated period, not more than six months. |
| Level 2 | Above 40% to 60% | The student is debarred from submitting a revised script for one year. |
| Level 3 | Above 60% | Registration of the student for that programme is cancelled. |
Scholars mostly miss three details in Regulation 12.
- Second time caught means one level up. If the same scholar is found plagiarising again, the punishment is taken from one level above what was given the last time.
- A degree already awarded is not safe. Even after the award, if plagiarism is proved, the degree can be kept in abeyance. The Institutional Academic Integrity Panel recommends for how long, and the head of the institution approves it.
- Nobody gets punished straight away. The regulation says the misconduct must be “established without doubt”, and only then a penalty can come. Till all avenues of appeal are exhausted and the person gets a fair chance to defend, nothing is final. The case goes to the Departmental Academic Integrity Panel, which has 45 days for its report, and after that the Institutional panel takes it up and decides.
For publications by faculty and researchers the same four levels are used. Only the penalties change, as below.
| Level | Penalty for academic and research publications (Reg. 12.2) |
|---|---|
| Level 0 (up to 10%) | No penalty. |
| Level 1 (above 10% to 40%) | Asked to withdraw the manuscript. |
| Level 2 (above 40% to 60%) | Withdraw the manuscript; denied one annual increment; may not supervise new Master’s, M.Phil. or Ph.D. scholars for two years. |
| Level 3 (above 60%) | Withdraw the manuscript; denied two successive annual increments; may not supervise new scholars for three years. |
What is excluded from the count
This part of the regulation changes your final number the most. Regulation 7 gives a list of what the similarity check shall exclude.
| Excluded by Regulation 7 | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Quoted work reproduced with all necessary permission and/or attribution | A passage you have quoted and cited properly should not be counted. The software has no way to see permission. So the reviewer looks for quotation marks and a citation. |
| References and bibliography | Your reference list will match with thousands of other papers. Leave it out, either with the checker’s filter or by taking it out of the file that goes for checking. |
| Table of contents, preface and acknowledgements | Front matter is written in fixed wording. That is why some universities want only the chapters to be submitted for the check. |
| Generic terms, laws, standard symbols and standard equations | Statute names, standard formulae like Bernoulli’s equation or the chi-square statistic, and the normal vocabulary of your discipline are not plagiarism. |
| Common knowledge or coincidental terms, up to 14 consecutive words | This is written in the note to Regulation 7. Short runs of ordinary phrasing are not counted. The “small match” filter in checkers comes from this idea. |
The note on “core work”, which is often overlooked
Below Regulation 7 there is a note. It says a scholar’s work “shall be based on original ideas, which shall include abstract, summary, hypothesis, observations, results, conclusions and recommendations only and shall not have any similarities.” If you read this word by word, the 10% is for the thesis overall. The parts that carry your own contribution should have nearly zero copied text. A few universities may check these parts on their own, so ask your department. Nobody worries much about some matches in the literature review or methods. Matches in the results or conclusions chapter are another matter. Your overall score may be low, still the examiner reads those pages carefully and notices it.
How universities apply the levels
Under Regulation 6 each university makes its own policy. Because of this, one thesis can pass at one university and get returned at another. Mostly the differences come in the following places.
- Which tool, and who runs it. Most universities accept a report only if the library or research office has generated it on the university’s licensed tool. A report you took yourself from some free website will not be accepted in its place.
- What is submitted for checking. Some universities want the full thesis without the bibliography. Others want the chapters only. A few check the synopsis also at the pre-submission stage.
- Filter settings. Are quotes and the bibliography left out automatically? What is the small-match threshold? (The 14-word note gives a natural reference for this.) And are your own earlier submissions in the repository left out or not?
- Stricter internal thresholds. A department or the university can fix a figure lower than 10%, or put a limit for each chapter. If your department has such a rule, that rule applies to you, whatever the UGC minimum is.
- Published papers from the thesis. Universities differ on whether your own published papers can be excluded as sources. There is more on this further down.
Some university format guides also cover the plagiarism check, and usually it is in the submission section. Our Anna University thesis format guide is one example, where these rules come next to the layout rules.
What individual universities’ documents say
We took these from the same university documents we used for our thesis-format guides. These documents get revised from time to time, so get the latest copy from your research section.
| University | What its own documents say | Our guide |
|---|---|---|
| Manonmaniam Sundaranar | Up to 10% on DrillBit (Revised Ph.D. Regulations 2023, 11.4) | MSU thesis format |
| Alagappa | 10% on iThenticate, with references and your own papers excluded (Ph.D. Regulations, August 2026, 12.5) | Alagappa thesis format |
| Periyar | “Acceptable limit 20%” on the plagiarism certificate form (Annexure 14); the regulations themselves give no figure | Periyar thesis format |
| Annamalai | No percentage in the 2026-27 regulations outside the ICAR stream of the Faculty of Agriculture | Annamalai thesis format |
| Savitribai Phule Pune (SPPU) | Similarity of 10% or less, with a certificate (Amended Ordinance 186, 10.15) | SPPU thesis format |
| Mumbai | Up to 10% carries no penalty (Ph.D. Regulations 2026, R.PhD.31) | Mumbai thesis format |
| Kerala | No percentage or software named in the Ph.D. Regulations 2022 (issued 07.12.2023) | Kerala thesis format |
| Calicut | 10% on the university’s plagiarism check certificate; UGC 2018 regulations adopted by University Order | Calicut thesis format |
| Delhi | No percentage; the library lists DrillBit for checking theses and its forms refer to the UGC 2018 norms (Delhi University Library System instructions, posted May 2025) | Delhi thesis format |
| Osmania | 10% similarity and a separate 20% limit on AI-generated content (Ph.D. Rules 2026-27, 28.1) | Osmania thesis format |
Cite this data: PhD Desk, “Plagiarism limits for PhD theses in India”, last reviewed , https://phddesk.in/guides/plagiarism-limits-by-university
DrillBit, Turnitin and Ouriginal: which checker you will meet
The Ministry of Education has a programme called ShodhShuddhi, and the INFLIBNET Centre runs it. Through this programme, universities and institutions have got plagiarism detection software since 1 September 2019. Till 30 September 2023, when that contract ended, INFLIBNET gave Ouriginal (earlier called Urkund). From 1 October 2023 it is giving DrillBit-Extreme, and full service started from 1 November 2023. If your university is using the national licence, there is a good chance your thesis gets checked on DrillBit. How that check works and how to read its report is in our DrillBit guide.
Many universities also have their own Turnitin licence. (Ouriginal is now part of Turnitin.) Some journals use iThenticate, which is the Turnitin product for publishers. DrillBit has its own database, Turnitin has another one. That is why one chapter can show quite different percentages on two checkers. You cannot say either number is “wrong”. What matters for you is the tool and the settings your university uses at submission.
How to read a similarity report
The similarity percentage shows how much of your text matches something in the checker’s database. It does not decide whether you plagiarised. Read the report step by step, in this order.
- Check the filters first. See if quotes, bibliography and small matches are excluded, and what threshold is set for small matches. For the same thesis, a report without filters can easily come several times higher than the filtered one.
- Then go to the source list. Sort the list so the biggest single sources come on top. One source giving 6% is a very different problem from sixty sources giving 0.1% each. In the first case there is usually a section closely paraphrased from one paper. In the second case it is mostly common phrasing.
- Open each large match. Maybe it is a quotation where you forgot the quote marks. It could be a standard definition or a statute, or a methods description that follows a standard protocol. It may even be your own published paper. Or it may really be borrowed prose.
- Look for your own earlier drafts. Suppose your synopsis or an earlier version of the thesis was put into the same checker’s repository. Then it can match your present draft almost fully. This is not plagiarism. It is a settings issue for the research office to correct. But you have to discuss about it with them before the report goes to your supervisor.
- Check where the similarity sits. Some matches in the literature review are expected. Matches in results, discussion or conclusions need your attention, whatever the total is.
Your own published papers
In India most PhD theses carry material from the scholar’s own journal papers, and many universities want it that way. The checker will show those papers as sources. Nothing in the UGC Regulations excludes them specifically, so here your university makes the rule. Some universities allow you to exclude your own publications if you give a declaration. Others count them. Either way, cite the paper in each chapter that uses it. Also write clearly in the thesis which chapter is based on which publication. Mostly the journal holds copyright of the published version. Publishers usually allow reuse in the author’s own thesis, still see that publisher’s policy once.
Getting within the limit through better citation and your own wording
When the report is genuinely high, the answer is almost always better scholarship in the chapter, and changing words will not solve it. These steps help.
- Quote and cite when you need the exact words, for example a definition or some legal provision. Even then keep the quotation short.
- Discuss many sources together. A review that takes one paper per paragraph ends up borrowing each paper’s phrasing. Put the studies under themes and compare them while making your own point. The chapter reads better and similarity comes down by itself.
- Describe standard methods briefly and cite the protocol rather than copying the whole protocol into the chapter.
- Cite your own earlier work the same way you cite other authors.
Our similarity report review is built around exactly this. We go through your report one match at a time. A person from your field helps you restructure the chapters so the argument stays your own. You remain the author from start to end. What we will do and what we won’t do is written in our ethics policy.
Checker workarounds count as misconduct
Scholars are still getting offers of ways to “beat” the software. Some people replace Latin letters with Cyrillic letters that look the same. Some put white-coloured characters between words. Others paste the text as images, use automatic synonym spinners, or translate the text by machine into another language and then back into English.
These kind of tricks fail for a few reasons. Checkers and research offices are already looking for them. Swap the letters or hide some text, and in the report it mostly comes out as junk characters. A thesis full of text pasted as images is obvious to anyone who opens the file. Spun text also reads strangely. Examiners catch sentences that no researcher in that field would ever write. The biggest problem is that the attempt itself shows intent. A file that has been doctored to give a low score is far more serious than an honest high score, because a high score usually means only rework. And remember Note 2 of Regulation 12.1. If plagiarism is proved even after the award, the degree can be put in abeyance.
AI-written text and AI detectors
When the 2018 Regulations were written, generative AI tools were not in common use, so the Regulations say nothing about them. Since then many universities have put out their own circulars. Turnitin and DrillBit also show AI-writing indicators now. Find out what your university’s latest circular says on AI before trusting any of these tools.
We have two cautions, and they go opposite ways. First, AI-generated text is not your work. If you present it as yours, it raises the same integrity question that copying does. A paraphrasing tool can also bring the similarity score down and push the AI score up. Second, an AI detector only gives a probability. It is not proof. These detectors are known to give false positives, mostly on formulaic academic prose and on writing by people whose first language is not English. Even Turnitin says that a student should not be punished only because of its AI score. Your own writing got flagged? Keep every old file with you. Old drafts, notes and version history are the strongest evidence that you wrote it yourself.
Want a specialist to help with this in your own work? Similarity Report Review and Citation Repair: a free first consultation, then a written scope and fixed quote.
Sources
FAQ
Questions scholars ask
Is 10% similarity the pass mark for a PhD thesis?
As per the UGC Regulations, up to 10% is Level 0, which means minor similarity and no penalty. Don’t take 10% like an exam pass mark and relax once you are below it. Say your 9% is sitting mostly in the results chapter or in the conclusions. An examiner can still ask you about it. Your university may also have a lower internal limit, or it may check each chapter separately.
Does the bibliography count towards the similarity percentage?
As per the regulation it should not be counted. Regulation 7 excludes references, bibliography, table of contents, preface and acknowledgements. Some universities remove them using the checker’s filter. Others ask you to submit a file without those pages. Your library or research office can tell you which method they follow.
My own published paper is showing as the top source. What do I do?
This happens a lot, since most theses are built on the scholar’s own papers only. There is nothing specific in the UGC Regulations for this case. Your university’s policy decides it. Some universities allow you to exclude the paper on declaration. In all cases, cite the paper inside the chapter and mention which chapters are drawn from which publications.
Why do DrillBit and Turnitin give different percentages for the same chapter?
The two tools compare your text against different databases. Even the way they match text is different, and default filters are not same. Neither of them is more correct. For you, the number that counts comes from the tool and settings your university uses for thesis submission.
What happens if my thesis is above 10% at submission?
Regulation 12.1 is clear on this. For above 10% to 40%, the revised script must come within a period not exceeding six months. If it is above 40% to 60%, resubmission is barred for one year. Above 60%, the registration is cancelled. Practically it may not reach that stage, because most universities check before formal submission itself. With a high score you usually revise and check again first.
Can someone guarantee my thesis will come out under 10%?
No. The similarity score depends on which checker is used and on its settings. Nobody can fix a number in advance. When someone promises a figure, mostly they are depending on mechanical rewording. If you want similarity to come down for good, rewrite with your own synthesis and proper citations. After that, check it with a filtered report on the same settings that your university uses.
