Five Malaysian universities. Five different sets of rules. One of them wants your final thesis printed double-sided on B5 paper; the rest want single-sided A4. One caps Turnitin per chapter rather than overall. One doesn’t use APA at all, even though almost everyone assumes it does. Here is what each actually requires, checked against the guide currently in force in September 2026.
Almost every postgraduate in Malaysia formats their thesis the same way: they get a Word file from a senior who graduated two years ago, assume the rules haven’t changed, and find out at the format check that they have.
The problem isn’t carelessness. It’s that each university keeps its requirements in a single long PDF on its own graduate school site, those PDFs are revised quietly, and nobody publishes a comparison. If you moved from a Master’s at one university to a PhD at another — extremely common here — you are carrying assumptions that are simply wrong.
So we read all five guides and put the numbers side by side.
The comparison
| UM | UPM | UKM | USM | UTM | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Body font | Times New Roman 12 | 12 pt — Arial, Book Antiqua, Bookman, Palatino, Tahoma or Times New Roman | Times New Roman 12 | Times New Roman 12 or Arial 11 | 12 pt — Times New Roman or Book Antiqua; or Arial, Tahoma, Calibri |
| Line spacing | Double | Double | 1.5 | Double | No blanket rule — set by line-counts between elements |
| Left margin | 4.0 cm | ≥ 4.0 cm | 3.8 cm | 4.0 cm | 3.25 cm |
| Top / bottom / right | 2.0 / 2.0 / 2.0 cm | ≥ 2.5 cm each | 3.0 / 2.5 / 2.5 cm | 2.5 / 2.5 / 2.5 cm | 2.5 / 2.5 / 3.25 cm |
| Paper & sides | A4, single-sided | A4, single-sided | A4, single-sided | A4, single-sided | A4 for viva, B5 for final — double-sided |
| PhD limit | 100,000 words | 20,000–100,000 words | 100,000 words / 400 pages | 80,000 words | 300 pages (no word limit) |
| Master’s limit | 60,000 words (research report 30,000) | 12,000–50,000 words | 60,000 words / 250 pages | 50,000 words | 200 pages |
| Abstract | ≤ 500 words; BM + English | 300–500 words; BM + English | 200–300 words; BM + English | ≤ 400 words; BM first | 300–500 words; BM + English |
| Referencing | APA, or faculty-approved style | Any one style, used consistently | Gaya UKM — not APA | Any one style, used consistently | Harvard, Vancouver or APA |
| Turnitin cap | 10–30%, faculty sets exact figure | ≤ 25% (≤ 20% for Business & Economics) | Not stated centrally | Not stated centrally | ≤ 20% per chapter |
| Final binding | ≥ 1 hardbound; maroon (thesis), navy (research report) | Hardbound; green = PhD, grey = Master’s | ≥ 2 hardbound + CD; dark blue = PhD, dark red = Master’s | 2 hardbound + 2 CDs; black = PhD, red = Master’s | 1 hardbound + softcopy; dark maroon = PhD, dark navy = Master’s |
Scroll the table sideways on mobile.
Read the table again and notice three things. The left margin is wider than the others at every single university — that is the binding edge, and setting symmetric margins in Word is the most common formatting error we see. UTM is the outlier on almost everything. And the referencing row is the one that costs people the most time, for the reason below.
The five differences that actually get theses returned
1. “Gaya UKM” is not APA
This is the single most expensive misunderstanding on this page. UKM uses its own author–date house style. It resembles APA closely enough that students format the whole reference list in APA, submit, and get it back. UKM’s own Graduate Centre publishes a separate “common mistakes” companion document largely because of this. If you are at UKM, format from the Gaya UKM guide itself — not from Mendeley’s APA output, and not from a template a friend used at another university.
2. UTM prints double-sided, on B5, and checks Turnitin per chapter
Three departures from what everyone else does, in one university. Your viva copies are A4; your final hardbound copy is B5, which means the page count and layout you signed off at viva is not the artefact you bind. And the similarity check is applied chapter by chapter at 20% — a thesis with a comfortable 12% overall can still fail if the literature review alone sits at 24%. Check per chapter early, not at the end.
3. USM puts the Bahasa Malaysia abstract first
Every one of these universities requires both a Bahasa Malaysia and an English abstract, regardless of the language the thesis is written in. But USM specifies that the BM version comes before the English one, even in an entirely English thesis. UM’s current guide puts English first for English-language submissions. It is a small thing that is trivially easy to get backwards, and it is checked.
4. UPM forbids headers and footers entirely
Not “discouraged” — the guide states they should not be used anywhere in the thesis. UPM also specifies caption placement that people routinely reverse: table captions go above the table, figure captions go below the figure. And UPM’s Turnitin cap tightens from 25% to 20% if you are under the School of Business and Economics.
5. Word limits are ceilings at some universities and ranges at others
UM, UKM and USM state maximums. UPM states a range — a PhD thesis is 20,000 to 100,000 words, and going over requires written permission from the Dean of SGS with justification. UTM sets no word limit at all and caps pages instead: 300 for a PhD, 200 for a Master’s. If you are working to a word target you inherited from another institution, confirm which kind of limit yours actually is.
What changed recently — and what you may be reading that is out of date
Part of why students get this wrong is that the guides move and get revised without announcement. Three things worth knowing as of September 2026:
- UM’s guideline has moved house. The old
ips.um.edu.myaddress no longer serves it. The current document — dated October 2023 — sits under the Institute for Advanced Studies atias.um.edu.my. Old bookmarks and old forum links go nowhere, which is why so many UM students are still working from a 2015 PDF found in a Google cache. - UM’s copy requirements dropped sharply. The older guideline asked for at least five softbound copies at examination and two hardbound at final submission. The current one asks for at least two softbound and at least one hardbound. Students following the old version are printing and paying for copies nobody wants. The stated similarity band also widened, from 10–25% to 10–30%.
- UTM now requires a generative-AI declaration. A separate form covering AI use in the writing process is part of the required paperwork under the 2023 manual. It is new enough that many supervisors haven’t mentioned it.
It also cuts the other way. UPM’s guide reads as a 2013 document because it largely is — its base text dates from the second edition, with targeted edits applied in September 2024 to the word limits, cover colours and submission timelines. USM’s format guide is dated February 2019 and is still the governing specification: the 2025 postgraduate handbook doesn’t restate the numbers, it points back to that 2019 PDF. UKM’s Gaya UKM is a 2015 printing of a 2010 revision. A guide being old does not make it superseded, and students sometimes discard current rules because the date on the cover looks stale.
The rule that overrides everything on this page
Your faculty can be stricter than your university, and frequently is.
UM is explicit about it: the similarity index “should be between 10% to 30%,” followed immediately by an instruction to refer to your own faculty. UM’s Faculty of Education sets its own threshold of 15% and mandates APA 7th specifically — neither of which applies university-wide. UPM allows faculties to vary copy counts. USM’s schools set the Turnitin threshold themselves, since the central guide publishes no number.
So use this page to know what to ask, not as the final word. Take the row for your university to your graduate school office or your supervisor and ask one question: does my faculty differ from this on word count, similarity percentage, or referencing style? Those three are where faculty-level overrides almost always live. Everything else — margins, paper, binding colour — is set centrally and rarely varies.
A practical order of operations
- Download your university’s current guide from the official site today, not a copy from a group chat. Check the date on it against what we’ve listed above.
- Set your margins and font before you write another paragraph. Retrofitting a 200-page document is miserable; starting correctly costs ten minutes.
- Run Turnitin on your literature review chapter early, well before the full submission — that chapter is almost always the one that breaches, and at UTM it is scored on its own.
- Confirm the three faculty-variable items in writing: word limit, similarity cap, referencing style.
- Check the binding specification before you pay the binder, particularly the cover colour and, at UTM, the paper size. Binders will print exactly what you hand them.
Want your thesis formatted to your university’s specification?
We work with postgraduate researchers across Malaysian universities on structure, formatting compliance, and getting a manuscript through format checking the first time — on your own work, to your own institution’s specification.
Sources — each university’s own current guideline:
Universiti Malaya, Guidelines for the Preparation of Research Report, Dissertation and Thesis (Oct 2023), Institute for Advanced Studies — ias.um.edu.my/guideline
Universiti Putra Malaysia, Postgraduate Student’s Guide: Thesis Preparation (2nd ed., re-edited 24 Sept 2024), School of Graduate Studies — sgs.upm.edu.my
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Panduan Penulisan Tesis — Gaya UKM (2015 printing), Pusat Siswazah — ukm.my/pusatsiswazah
Universiti Sains Malaysia, Format Thesis Guidelines (21 Feb 2019), Institute of Postgraduate Studies — ips.usm.my
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Thesis Manual 2023 (updated 18 Oct 2023), School of Graduate Studies — sps.utm.my
Figures were read from each guide as published at the time of writing, September 2026. Guides are revised without notice and faculties may impose stricter requirements — always confirm against your own faculty before submission. If you spot something that has changed, tell us and we will update this page.