How to check your thesis before submission: 7 steps

An eye that has looked at the same text for months fills in the missing link on its own. When you read your own thesis, the feeling of "I know what I meant" hides exactly the gaps a committee will see. The steps below are ordered to suspend that feeling on purpose.

1. Reduce the research question to one sentence

Can you write the question your thesis answers in a single sentence? If you cannot, the committee will not be able to either. Keep that sentence next to you; you will read the text against it in every step that follows.

• Is the question stated explicitly in the introduction, or left for the reader to infer?
• Does the conclusion answer the same question, or did it drift along the way?
• If there are sub-questions or hypotheses, does each one have a counterpart in the results?

2. Follow the chain of the argument

Each chapter should hand a justification on to the next. Reading the last paragraphs of each chapter in a row shows where the chain breaks. Check whether words like "therefore" and "thus" really introduce a conclusion that follows from the previous sentence, or a new claim.

3. Test whether the method fits the question

Committees read the methods chapter asking "why is this method right for this question?" How the sample was selected, where the instrument came from, which assumptions the analysis relies on and how they were tested should all be written down. For a detailed list, see the methods chapter guide.

4. Separate findings from interpretation

One of the most common problems is interpreting results more strongly than the data allow. If a correlational analysis is described in causal language, or a small sample is generalised, the committee will ask about it. Also check that every number in your tables matches the number in the text.

5. Tie the literature to your argument

A literature review is not a list of summaries but an argument for why your thesis is needed. Each section should end with the equivalent of "these studies do not show this, and my thesis addresses it". More in the literature review guide.

6. Verify the references one by one

Every citation in the text needs an entry in the reference list, and every entry needs a citation in the text. Also check that DOIs resolve to the right publication and that you are not relying on a retracted paper. A review of medical journals found that 16.9% of citations were not supported by the source they cited (Baethge & Jergas, 2025), so this step catches more errors than people expect. How to do it: the reference check guide.

7. Spelling and formatting last

Thesis formatting rules (layout, font size, citation style) differ between universities, so follow your own graduate school’s current guide. Leave formatting fixes for the end, because they break again every time the content changes.

Who should do the check?

Ideally someone who knows the field but has never seen the text: your advisor, a faculty member who is not on your committee, or a peer from the same field. That is not always possible; in Nature’s 2019 graduate survey, half of PhD students said they spent less than an hour a week one-to-one with their supervisor. In that case, leave the text for a few days and read it in the order above, focusing on one question at a time.

tezkeys does this reading automatically: it reads your thesis chapter by chapter, marks argument, method, findings and literature problems on your own text, compares your references with Crossref records and lists the questions your committee is likely to ask. The reference pre-check is free; see what a report looks like in the sample report.