Thesis Formatting Guide: Order, Margins, Numbering and Final Checks

A thesis is judged on its content, but it is also checked — sometimes page by page — against a formatting specification. Graduate schools do return submissions over a wrong margin or a page number in the wrong place. The difficulty is that there is no single correct format: each university publishes its own rules, and departments often add more.

This guide summarizes what we found in the published guidelines of five Korean universities and three US universities, checked in September 2026. Treat it as a map for reading your own school's handbook, not a replacement for it. You can work through every item in the thesis format checklist.

1. The order of parts

Most handbooks use some version of this sequence:

1. Title page (and, in Korea, an outer cover and an inner title page)
2. Approval or acceptance page with committee signatures
3. Copyright page (where required)
4. Abstract
5. Acknowledgments (optional)
6. Table of contents, list of tables, list of figures, list of abbreviations
7. Main text
8. References
9. Appendices

Positions of the abstract and acknowledgments vary most. Harvard GSAS puts the unnumbered Thesis Acceptance Certificate first, then the title page, copyright page and abstract. MIT puts the abstract right after the title page. Korean universities usually require both a Korean abstract and an English abstract; several place the English abstract at the very end of the volume. Follow your template's order exactly — almost no handbook invites you to rearrange it.

2. Paper, margins, font and spacing

Three lessons stand out.

Spacing rules conflict across schools. Harvard wants a double-spaced body, UC Berkeley wants single spacing throughout, and MIT allows single, one-and-a-half or double. Do not carry over a habit from another institution.

Word-processor settings do not translate one to one. Yonsei publishes separate margin values for Hangul (HWP) and Microsoft Word, because the two programs measure header space differently, and it equates 160% line spacing in HWP with 1.15 in Word. If your school gives values for one program and you use another, ask for the equivalent rather than guessing.

The printed size may differ from the working page. Several Korean schools edit on A4 with wide margins and bind at a smaller trim size, while others set the smaller page from the start. Check which one your handbook means before applying the margin numbers.

3. Page numbering

The near-universal pattern:

• Title, copyright and approval pages are counted but carry no printed number.
• Front matter uses lowercase roman numerals (i, ii, iii).
• The main text restarts at Arabic 1.

UC Berkeley allows the number at the upper right, lower right or bottom center, but it must stay in the same position on every page, including landscape pages. MIT is the notable exception: the title page is page 1 and the whole thesis runs in one consecutive sequence.

In Word, insert a Section Break (Next Page) before Chapter 1, unlink the footer from the previous section, set the front section's format to i, ii, iii, and restart the main section at 1.

4. Heading numbering

Theses tend to use one of four systems:

• Decimal: Chapter 1, 1.1, 1.1.1 — common in science and engineering, and convenient for cross-references ("see Section 3.2.1").
• Roman chapters with decimal sections: I., II., III. with 2.1, 2.2 underneath (the POSTECH sample).
• Roman–alphabetic outline: I., A., 1., a., (1) — traditional in the humanities.
• Unnumbered levels: APA 7 tells authors not to label headings with numbers or letters and instead distinguishes five levels by format (Level 1 centered bold, Level 2 flush-left bold, Level 3 flush-left bold italic, and so on).

Whatever you choose, use it everywhere, indent consistently, keep the punctuation after numbers identical at each level, and avoid a section with only one subsection. If your department numbers chapters but you cite in APA, the chapter numbering still follows the school — APA governs the references, not the thesis structure.

5. Numbering tables and figures

You can number tables and figures sequentially (Table 1, 2, 3 … through the whole thesis) or by chapter (Table 3.1, 3.2 …). Chapter numbering scales better for long theses and keeps numbers stable when you move a chapter. Place table titles above tables. For figures, APA 7 puts the number and title above the figure, while many science theses caption below — pick one convention, refer to every table and figure by number in the text, and generate the lists of tables and figures automatically so they match the captions.

6. Footnotes or in-text citations

There are three broad ways to credit sources: footnotes with superscript numbers (common in history, law and philosophy), numbered references in brackets such as [1] (engineering and medicine), and author–date citations in parentheses (social sciences; see the APA guide). Use one method throughout. Author–date papers can still use occasional explanatory footnotes, but keep them short — long discursive notes belong in the text or an appendix.

7. Who chooses the reference style?

Usually your department and your advisor, not the graduate school. A sensible order of preference is: the department's required style; otherwise the author guidelines of the journal you plan to submit chapters to; otherwise the dominant style of your field (APA, Chicago, IEEE, Vancouver). Korean departments add their own conventions, such as listing Korean-language sources before foreign ones; the Korean journal styles guide covers these.

8. A pre-submission sequence

Late edits keep coming, so the order of checks matters:

1. Freeze the content after incorporating committee revisions.
2. Match every in-text citation to a reference entry and vice versa.
3. Check chapter, table, figure and equation numbers and all cross-references.
4. Verify page setup and page numbering in every section.
5. Refresh the table of contents and the lists of tables and figures — last.
6. Confirm the title is identical on the title page, abstract, approval form and submission system.
7. Gather ethics paperwork: IRB approval or exemption for human-subjects research and any required similarity-check report. A similarity percentage alone does not establish plagiarism; read the matched passages.
8. Export the PDF, embed fonts (Harvard requires it; MIT requires PDF/A-1) and page through the whole file.
9. Submit forms, bound copies and the repository deposit before the deadline.

9. Let styles do the work

Most formatting errors come from formatting by hand. In Word, modify the built-in Heading 1–3 styles, link them to a multilevel list, and use References → Table of Contents, Insert Caption, Insert Table of Figures and Cross-reference. Press Ctrl+A, then F9, before exporting to refresh every field. In Hangul, define outline styles, use the outline numbering format, build the contents with the table-of-contents tool, and split front matter from the body with section breaks. If your school supplies a template, paste your text into it as unformatted text and apply the template's styles, so the original formatting never leaks in.

Figures in this guide were checked against each school's published guidance on 2026-09-23. Guidelines change between terms; your own school's current template is the final authority.