Days to minutes: How VIT Vellore transformed their PhD thesis formatting using SciFlow

Executive summary

VIT Vellore is one of India’s largest private universities, with PhD scholars submitting theses across disciplines, from computer science to biotechnology, mechanical engineering, and civil engineering. The institution’s previous thesis formatting process was rigid and code-heavy, leading to inconsistent outputs and a review pipeline that could take a faculty committee between 20 and 40 days per thesis.

By partnering with SciFlow to build a better PhD thesis template and rolling it out as a mandatory standard, VIT Vellore brought thesis formatting and review down to a matter of minutes, freed up faculty time, and built a long-term partnership now expanding across degree programs and additional campuses.

The challenge: a code heavy process that did not work for all

Before adopting SciFlow, VIT Vellore relied on a standard LaTeX-based PhD thesis template. While computer science scholars managed the code heavy environment, scholars in disciplines such as biotechnology, civil engineering, and mechanical engineering often struggled with compilation and formatting errors. Lacking programming skills, many scholars resorted to paying third-party agencies just to format their documents into the required layout.

Reviewing the results also created a heavy administrative bottleneck. Once a scholar submitted a thesis, an R&D department staff member had to manually check every page of documents running to 120, 200, or even 300 pages for compliance, a process Dr. SasiKumar Periyasamy, Professor and Assistant Dean-Academic Research, who oversees VIT’s association with SciFlow for theses and dissertations, says could take faculty more than 20 to 40 days per thesis, adding pressure on reviewing faculty and research guides alike.

The solution: a better institutional template to support all scholars

VIT Vellore evaluated other tools before choosing SciFlow. SciFlow proposed a single workflow, with dedicated support, to build a better PhD thesis template to match the institution’s specific formatting requirements. Scholars both with and without programming skills could use it with confidence. Two further factors influenced the decision.

With confidential, unpublished PhD research at stake, which is a serious concern for a private university operating in a competitive market, SciFlow’s GDPR-compliant approach to document security gave the necessary confidence.

VIT Vellore also wanted a genuine partner, and SciFlow’s willingness to improve the platform and stay closely involved after go-live reinforced that this was a long-term relationship.

Implementation: training thousands of scholars

Getting thousands of PhD scholars to adopt the new platform required an organized strategy. VIT, iGroup and SciFlow ran an intensive onboarding push, including a three-day, on-site training programme that covered around 1,200 students in a single day across four sessions. Since then, VIT has kept up a regular cadence of workshops roughly twice every six months to bring new scholar cohorts up to speed: VIT admitted more than 500 new PhD scholars in a single recent intake alone.

Ongoing support matters just as much as the initial rollout did. VIT’s team talks regularly with SciFlow’s India-based account team, who help resolve formatting queries as they come up. VIT and SciFlow continue to work through equation formatting together, since scholars in mathematics and related departments rely on large, complex equations in specific formats. SciFlow’s editor lets scholars write these equations directly in LaTeX, so specialists can keep working the way they’re used to within the same single workflow.

Key results: from days to minutes

SciFlow has transformed VIT’s thesis review process. What used to take a faculty committee 20 to 40 days to check now takes around 10 minutes, because reviewers can scroll through an already-formatted PDF rather than checking every page for compliance by hand. Guides and co-authors can also review and approve a thesis online the moment a scholar shares it with them, without needing a face-to-face meeting or a printed copy.

The scale of adoption reflects that impact:

• More than 6,000 scholars, including 5,000-plus PhD candidates, are now using SciFlow across VIT’s Vellore and Chennai campuses.
• Over 13,000 new documents so far this year.
• SciFlow is now mandatory for all PhD thesis submissions at VIT Vellore, usage across the institution.

Students have also started using SciFlow independently to format journal article submissions, without being asked to. Editors no longer return articles for reformatting against journal templates, which VIT says has shortened the review timeline on the publishing side too, supporting the university’s broader ambitions around international rankings and research output.

SciFlow, too, sees the relationship as having grown well beyond a standard licence. “We’re able to build a very trustworthy relationship with them,” says R Sunil Kumar, Product Head (Technology), iGroup India. “They don’t just look at us as a publisher or a vendor. They share their long-term plans with us. We’re trying to be more of a solution partner than a technology or product partner.”

What’s next?

VIT is already planning to extend SciFlow beyond PhD theses. Its research leadership wants to prove out the model with PhD submissions first, then roll the platform out to Master’s and B.Tech-level project submissions and eventually give faculty members access to write research papers on the platform too.

VIT is also expanding the relationship across its wider network. VIT’s Andhra Pradesh campus has already asked about adopting SciFlow, and the university’s Bhopal campus is a likely next step. Because other private universities in Tamil Nadu and South India often follow VIT’s lead on procurement decisions.

Key takeaways for other institutions

• Solve for every discipline, not just the technical ones. A one-size-fits-all, coding-based tool works for computer science scholars but can shut out everyone else. VIT’s move away from LaTeX was driven by scholars who shouldn’t need programming skills to complete a PhD.
• Invest in hands-on training at scale. Reaching 1,200 students in a single day, and repeating that cadence as new scholars enrol, made the difference between a mandate on paper and a platform people use.
• Treat support as core to the product. VIT’s team pointed to responsive, India-based support as central to their confidence in SciFlow, and to the university’s willingness to expand its use across campuses and degree levels.