3 October 2026 · 8 min read
For many master's and bachelor's students in Nepal, the thesis is the first document whose plagiarism report becomes part of the official record. Departments increasingly ask for a similarity report to accompany the final submission, sometimes as a printed page bound with the thesis, sometimes as a file sent to the research committee, and more recently alongside an AI writing report. Students tend to discover this requirement late, at exactly the point when there is least time to deal with a bad result. This guide explains what the report is, who produces it, and how to make sure the official one holds no surprises.
A similarity report on a thesis is the same kind of document as one on an assignment, just much longer and read more carefully. It normally includes:
The summary page with the headline figure is what usually gets attached or signed off. The full report is what a supervisor or committee opens when that figure raises a question.
There is no single procedure across Nepali universities, and often not even across departments in the same faculty. In some programmes the supervisor runs the check; in others it is the department office, the library or a research committee; in some, students submit through a portal and the report is generated automatically. The acceptable threshold, the exclusion settings and whether an AI report is required also differ.
Find out three things early, ideally before you start writing the final chapters: who runs the official check, what threshold applies to your programme, and which settings are used. Get the answer from your department or supervisor directly rather than from a senior, and in writing if you can. Rules on this are changing year by year, and a figure that applied two batches ago may not apply to you.
The official check is usually run once, near the end. If it comes back high, you are rewriting under pressure, possibly after your defence date has been set. A pre-check on your own draft, run while chapters are still being finished, turns that situation around: you see the matches while you can still fix them properly.
Checking chapter by chapter also tells you where the problem actually is. In most Nepali theses, the matches concentrate in two places: the literature review, where summaries track their sources too closely, and the methodology, where standard descriptions of sampling, instruments and statistical tests are phrased the same way in hundreds of documents. The introduction and results are usually much lower. Knowing which chapter carries the weight means you rework one section instead of the whole thesis.
One practical warning: make sure any pre-check is run without saving your file to a shared student repository. If a draft is stored in the repository, the official check later can match your thesis against your own earlier upload and show a very high figure. Ask whoever runs your pre-check about this before you send the file.
Nepali theses almost always grow out of an approved proposal, and large parts of the introduction, objectives and methodology carry over. If the proposal was ever uploaded to a checking system that stores papers, the final thesis will match it, sometimes heavily. This is not plagiarism, but it needs explaining. Mention it in your note to the supervisor, and where possible ask for the earlier submission to be excluded from the comparison.
The same thesis can show very different percentages depending on settings. A report that counts the reference list will match every other paper citing the same sources. A report that counts quoted material will flag passages that are correctly quoted and cited. A report that counts every short phrase will pick up standard academic wording no one can avoid.
When you compare a pre-check figure with the official one, compare like with like. If your department excludes the bibliography and quotes, run your pre-check the same way. If it does not, expect the official figure to be higher, and prepare to explain the bibliographic matches rather than trying to remove them.
Do not start rewriting immediately. First sort the matches into groups:
Then write a short explanation for your supervisor: the overall figure, the largest matches, which ones are bibliographic or quoted, and what you have rewritten. One page is enough. Supervisors in Nepal deal with these reports constantly, and a student who arrives with the matches already classified is in a far better position than one who arrives with only a number and a worry.
If an AI report is also flagged, treat it separately. Similarity is fixed by citing and rewriting; an AI flag is answered with your drafting trail — version history, notes and earlier drafts — not by rewriting the chapter.
Related reading:
Worried about what the official report will show? Send your thesis or the chapters you are unsure about on WhatsApp. We will prepare a thesis report — similarity and AI, chapter by chapter, with every flagged passage explained — so you know where you stand before your department runs its check.
Tell us what you need checked and when it is due. Your document is checked without being stored in any student-paper repository, so the check never counts against your real submission. The reports come back with what each match means, not just a percentage.