Shodhganga thesis submission

What Shodhganga and Shodhgangotri are

Shodhganga keeps the full text of completed theses. These come from universities that have signed an agreement, called an MoU, with INFLIBNET. The theses are arranged university-wise and then department-wise. Each thesis have its own record with title, researcher, guide, year, abstract and PDF files, mostly one per chapter. Anybody can read them free, without login.

Shodhgangotri is a smaller site and it is for research that is still going on. Synopses approved at PhD registration are kept there. The idea is that scholars and committees can see who is working on which topic, and nobody repeats the same topic by mistake.

Both sites run on DSpace, the open-source repository software many university libraries use. The pages look very plain and open slowly when many people are using them. Still, these theses are not on any other site. For most Indian universities, Shodhganga is the only public copy of their theses.

What the UGC rules require

As per the UGC (Minimum Standards and Procedures for Award of Ph.D. Degree) Regulations, 2022, this duty belongs to the university. The scholar is not responsible for it. The timing is also fixed. Once the evaluation is completed successfully, and before the award of the degree is announced, the degree-awarding institution has to submit an electronic copy of the thesis to INFLIBNET for hosting. Then other higher education and research institutions can access it. The older UGC rules also had a similar provision.

What does this mean for you in practice?

• Deposit is not optional when your PhD is awarded under the UGC regulations. The timing and the paperwork are decided by your university.
• It happens after the viva, and not when you submit the thesis. Shodhganga should get the final thesis, with corrections done.
• Many universities link it to the degree. In some places the provisional certificate is not given, or your name is not put in the convocation list, till the library confirms the deposit or you hand over the soft copy they want.

UGC’s 2018 regulations on academic integrity are a different matter. As per them the thesis goes for a similarity check before submission and you sign an undertaking. That check comes much earlier. You can read about it in our guide to plagiarism limits by university. To see where the deposit comes in the full list of PhD stages, look at our PhD timeline guide.

How a thesis is deposited on Shodhganga

Each university does it a bit differently, but the steps mostly go like this.

1. You submit a soft copy of the final thesis with whatever form is asked. It goes to the university library, the Shodhganga cell or the research section. A few universities take the soft copy at the time of thesis submission itself and replace it with the corrected version after the viva. Others collect it only after the viva is over.
2. The university checks it. The library opens the file to see nothing is missing and it is the approved thesis only. Many universities break the PDF into chapter files here, or ask the scholar to do it.
3. The university coordinator uploads it to Shodhganga, under your university and department. The metadata is entered along with it: title, your name, supervisor, department, year, keywords and abstract.
4. The record goes live only after INFLIBNET side processing gets over. This can take some weeks or many months. Normally your degree does not wait for this, unless your university has a rule that it should.

Mostly you will not upload anything on Shodhganga by yourself. The university arranges the deposit. Suppose an outsider asks you a fee to “upload” it to Shodhganga. Ask your research cell before paying anybody.

What to prepare

• Final PDF of the thesis made after the corrections asked at the viva. The copy you sent to examiners is not the one to give.
• Fonts should be embedded and the text should be selectable. A scanned image cannot be searched or checked.
• The PDF should not have any password, printing restriction or encryption.
• Some universities ask for one file per part. In that case the title page, certificates, abstract, contents, each chapter, references and appendices all go as separate files.
• Title exactly as it was registered. Your name and your supervisor’s name spelled the same way as in the university records.
• Any declaration or undertaking form the university needs for deposit, with your signature.
• Remove personal data from the appendices, like participant names, phone numbers, signed consent forms and photographs where people can be identified.
• If a patent is being filed on your work, give a written request to your research cell asking for a delay before the thesis becomes public.

If you need a delay

Some universities allow the public release of the thesis to be held back for a limited period. Mostly this is allowed only when a patent application or commercial agreement is pending. There is no one national procedure for it. So discuss about the delay with your supervisor and research cell much before the viva, and take their decision in writing.

What happens after your thesis is on Shodhganga

After your thesis comes on Shodhganga, it is open to everybody. Journal reviewers, similarity-checking systems and other scholars can all read it. Three things follow from this.

Similarity matches against your own thesis

Suppose later you send a journal paper made from one chapter of your thesis. The similarity report may then match big portions of the paper to your own Shodhganga thesis. Most journals have no problem that a paper is coming from the author’s thesis. Problem comes only when thesis text is pasted as it is. Also many want you to mention in the cover letter that the paper is based on your thesis. How to read such matches is explained in our guide to reading a Turnitin report. The easy way out is to write the papers from your chapters before the thesis, or at the same time. Some journal forms have a prior dissemination question, write the Shodhganga thesis in that box.

Copyright

Deposit lets people read your thesis. It does not give them any right to copy it. They can quote it and cite it, same as any other source. What rights stay with you and what rights go to your university depends on your university’s rules and on the form you signed at deposit. Keep one copy of that form with you.

Errors in the record

If the Shodhganga record has your name, title or supervisor wrong, or a chapter file is missing, ask your university library to correct it. The correction goes through the university coordinator only. INFLIBNET does not take it directly from you.

Searching Shodhganga for your literature review

For a first-year scholar, Shodhganga is very useful, but few use it properly. Many times an Indian thesis has the exact thing that international journals don’t have. There is data from Indian settings, and questionnaires already translated into regional languages. There are profiles of districts and industries, and literature from Indian journals which is difficult to trace in other places.

How to search

• Browse university-wise and department-wise. You will see what work is already done in your own department and how the local theses are arranged. This is the fastest way to pick up the unwritten habits of your department.
• Search using keyword, title, researcher or guide. Try different phrasings, and the older terms for your topic also, because a title from 2010 and a title from 2024 many times use different words for the same thing.
• Use Google as a second route. Put site:shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in in a Google search. Sometimes this finds theses that the site’s own search misses, since Google indexes the text inside the PDF chapters.
• Read the right files. Every thesis is split chapter-wise. The abstract and the review of literature chapter are mostly the most useful files. Somebody’s questionnaire is mostly in the appendix file only.

Using what you find

A Shodhganga thesis is cited as an unpublished doctoral thesis. Give the university and year, and add the Shodhganga handle URL if your citation style allows it. Examiners have evaluated the thesis, but it is not peer-reviewed the way a journal paper is, so handle it like that. Never reuse text from it. Your own thesis will also go for checking, and similarity software matches against theses, not only journals. Our guide on how to write a literature review explains how to bring these sources into your argument.

Before you register a topic, search Shodhgangotri also for synopses on the same subject. Maybe someone registered almost the same topic two years back. You want to find that out before your committee meeting, not in the middle of it. The rest of that stage is in our PhD synopsis guide.

How do you search Shodhganga for past theses in your area?

Checking earlier work in your area without any method will waste lot of time. The method below matches the site as it was in September 2026.

Start from the Search & Browse menu

On the Shodhganga home page there is a Search & Browse menu. From there you can browse by Universities & Departments, Upload Date, Researcher/Guide, Title and Keyword. To see the theses from your own department, open your university from the list. That page shows the departments which have deposited theses. There is a Discover panel on it, and you can narrow the list by keyword, year completed and language. In the search box you can choose one university or “All of Shodhganga”.

Narrow a broad search with filters

A simple keyword search mostly gives far more results than anyone can read. In September 2026, searching microfinance gave over a lakh of records. When a filter for Title contains “self help” was added, the list came down to under 300. The Add filters row is below the results, with Title, Researcher/Guide, Keyword, Date Completed or Language. First look at theses completed in the last ten years. After that, go further back.

Log what you find

For every thesis close to your topic, write down the same few points in a spreadsheet:

With twenty rows in this log you can see which settings, methods and questions are well covered and where the work is thin. Many times the “left open” column helps the most. That is where the earlier scholars write what they could not do. But take those notes as leads only, and check them with recent journal papers. They are not a ready-made gap. How to turn a lead into a gap that you can defend is shown in the research gap statement guide.

Use past theses as evidence, not a template

Doing an earlier thesis again in another district does not count as a contribution, unless the new setting gives a different answer. Taking the structure, objectives or wording of an old thesis is a bigger problem, because similarity software checks against the deposited theses also. Read past theses to know what is done, then plan your own study.

Check Shodhgangotri for work in progress

Shodhganga has only completed work. Synopses approved at registration are on Shodhgangotri, so that is the place to see who is working on a topic right now. But its coverage is not full. The home page says 154 universities and institutes are contributing synopses. If you find nothing there, it does not prove that nobody is working on your topic. Ask your supervisor as well.