High similarity score on your thesis? What it means and how to fix it honestly

First, read the report, not just the number

A similarity percentage is the share of your text that matches other sources. It is not a plagiarism verdict. A high score often comes from things that should not count: a reference list, quoted passages, standard methods text, or your own published papers. Scholars have reported tools flagging legitimate work; at one university, 116 of 121 theses were flagged and returned (Plagiarism Today, March 2026).

What UGC rules say counts

Under the UGC 2018 plagiarism regulations, similarity up to 10% is Level 0 with no penalty, and penalties rise in bands above that (summary). Quoted work with attribution, references and bibliography, table of contents, acknowledgements, generic terms and standard equations are excluded. See our UGC plagiarism levels page, and always check your own university's rules, which can be stricter.

Fix it, section by section

• Ask for exclusions to be applied. If the report counts your bibliography, quotes or front matter, ask the library or your guide to rerun it with exclusions on.
• Quote and cite. A sentence you need word for word goes in quotation marks with a citation.
• Paraphrase properly. Rewrite in your own words and sentence structure, keep the meaning, and still cite the source. Changing a few words is not paraphrasing.
• Summarise long background. Literature you only need for context can often be summarised in a few sentences with citations.
• Your own published work counts too. Cite it, and follow your university's rule on reusing it.
• Methods text that must stay standard: cite the protocol you followed instead of copying it.

What not to do

Don't use "humanizer" tools, character swaps or paraphrasing tools that change words without understanding. They can be caught, they damage your writing, and they don't fix the real issue: missing attribution.

Check before you submit

In CitedWriter you can run a similarity pre-check that applies the UGC exclusions and shows your level, see which sentences match, and rewrite them in your own voice with citations. It compares against scholarly abstracts, your PDFs and your other documents, so it does not replace your university's official DrillBit, ShodhShuddhi or Turnitin report.