Successfully Submitting Your Study to ProQuest/UMI

By Paul Lai, Dissertation Editor

Congratulations! You’ve just received the Chief Academic Officer’s approval of your capstone study abstract. There are just a few steps to complete before you receive your doctoral degree. One major stumbling block for many students is submission of the study to ProQuest/UMI. This blog post offers some advice on how to avoid delays at this stage. Keep these tips in mind when you are drafting your capstone proposal, when you work on each chapter or section of your final study, and when you revise the manuscript to submit it for the form and style review.

After final abstract approval (which will not contain the seal on the left, sadly), you will receive an email from the Center for Research Quality (CRQ) about the remaining steps of the capstone process and doctoral degree. In this email, CRQ will direct you to the submission website where you will enter information about your study and then upload a Portable Document Format (PDF) file of your capstone study. (Note that the latest versions of Microsoft Word offer the built-in function: Save As a PDF file.)

Within a couple of business days of submitting your PDF, you will receive an email from CRQ via the ProQuest website, either approving your submission or pointing out required revisions before your study can be approved. If you do not receive an email, look in your spam folder and log in to the submission website to check your status. Do not assume that you are done until you have received an email from ProQuest that your PDF has been approved and that the graduation process has been triggered.

Here are six common reasons for rejecting a PDF:

• Blank pages
• Table of contents errors (usually when the automated table values are missing: Error! Bookmark not defined.)
• Highlighting, colored font, or track changes remain
• Approval page is not the first page
• Incorrect page numbers
• Formatting errors in the front matter (title pages, abstract, dedication, acknowledgments, table of contents), especially with page numbering

Many of these problems are due to the conversion from Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx) to PDF, particularly if you have formatted your document manually (for line spacing, page breaks, hanging indents, and other elements) rather than with Word’s automated features. Once you have converted the document, be sure to scroll through the entire PDF to make sure there are no errors. Using the capstone templates (PhD, EdD, DBA, DNP) and style tags will help reduce these types of errors.

To recap:

• Use the capstone template for your program.
• Thoroughly review your PDF file before you submit it.
• Check your email account to see whether your PDF file was accepted or whether changes are required. 
• If changes are required, make them promptly and resubmit.

Once you get that final confirmation, your capstone study will be sent to ProQuest, and you will soon be a published researcher!

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Paul Lai, who joined the Writing Center in 2011, has a background is in teaching college English and editing scholarly journals and literary magazines. His dog's name is Giles.