Thesis and Dissertation Services Graduate Directors Handbook

Students completing masters and doctoral degrees requiring a formal thesis or dissertation must register with and follow home college and university TAD processes. The Graduate College coordinates the final approval and submission processes for the manuscript.

Successfully submitting a thesis or dissertation requires not only the creation of knowledge but also a number of technical steps. Both are relatively (or completely) new to the student. Graduate advisors have an obligation to familiarize themselves with TAD processes and to assist their advisees in following them. Programs, in turn, should provide all graduate advisors with an outline of the TAD process specific to the department and college, as well as publicizing the kinds of assistance that the Graduate College provides (see below).

The list of deadlines is updated for the next academic year every spring and made available at the Deadlines page on the Graduate College Thesis & Dissertation Services website. Per Graduate Council, all TAD deadlines are mandatory and final. There are four deadlines that must be met for graduation: 

• Graduation Application (set by the registrar’s office)
  • NOTE: Students should consider initiating the Graduate College TAD process by filing the TAD Submission Form at this point.
• Oral Defense 
• Post-Defense Format Review 
  • Latest time to submit the TAD Submission Form.
  • Manuscript must be approved by committee and advisor
  • Changes to content made beyond this deadline will result in missed deadline 
• Final Clearance 
  • Format approved
  • PDF uploaded
  • SED Completed (Ph.D. only)
  • Oral Defense form received 
  • Optional paperwork complete

• All students should type or import their manuscripts into the college-specific template and follow the format examples and instructions there. 
• Writers should follow discipline- or journal-specific style guidelines (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.). Particular colleges and programs have specific formatting requirements beyond those found in the template.
• The student, advisor, and committee are responsible for the academic integrity, spelling, punctuation, grammar, and appropriate disciplinary conventions of the document. 
• If a non-traditional layout or multimedia presentation is used, the textual content must be created using a style guide and the established formatting guidelines and then:
  • provide a link to the developed multimedia piece or slideshow as a supplement to the manuscript.
  • the presentation of the non-traditional, free-form layout as an e-book should be placed in the appendix.

All TAD forms and templates can be found on the Graduate College website at https://www.ohio.edu/graduate/etd/tad-forms-and-templates. More detailed information and a video giving an overview of the TAD process can be found at https://www.ohio.edu/graduate/current-students/thesis-dissertation-services.

Students are strongly encouraged to send their documents for an initial format check before the oral defense. All documents and questions can be sent to tad@ohio.edu. Response time is generally within 48 hours.

After completing the defense and making any required content changes, students should email their documents immediately to TAD Services at tad@ohio.edu for a final format check. Please ask students to email their documents as early as possible in the semester to avoid delays during TAD Services peak time near the deadline each semester.

Students must be registered in any term in which they are using university services, including working with their director and committee AND the semester in which they graduate. Students should register for at least 0.5 hours of 6950 (thesis) or 8950 (dissertation) in the term in which they complete the TAD Process. Students who are not officially registered for at least 0.5 hours are not eligible to receive Final Clearance TAD services. The only exception is students meeting the “Early” deadlines; early filers must have been registered in the semester prior to actual degree conferral.

Theses and dissertations are normally published electronically in OhioLink four weeks after they have been cleared as final, and they are available as open access documents. Students should be advised to contact publishers to find out: a) whether they consider an Electronic Thesis/Dissertation (ETD) published in a library or via ProQuest/UMI to be prior publication, and b) whether they will consider for publication a manuscript derived from an online thesis or dissertation.

If immediate online access is likely to complicate plans to use the thesis or dissertation as part of a future scholarly publication, students may request a publication delay. Initial delays may be one to five years in length. At the end of the first delay, a second may be requested, for an additional one to five years. OhioLink publication may be delayed up to ten years, but only if the first and second requests are for five years each. The form for publication delay is found at this website.

Please immediately contact the Director of TAD Services if you receive notification of a possible plagiarism/copyright issue with a completed thesis or dissertation, even if this document was approved in a prior term.