What should I do if I discover a typo in the title of my MS thesis after submission

Question

After I submitted my thesis recently, I discovered that I made a very silly mistake in typing the title of my thesis; I missed one letter. Instead of implementation I typed "implemenation". The thesis is now printed and submitted.

I was very cautious but still, this typo slipped my attention, probably due to some technical issues that I had with my LaTeX editor and using separate files for title and body. Now the typos is there and I want to fix it. I found similar questions (here and there) but it looks like my problem is different. Do you have any suggestions? For example, can I submit an erratum?

Answer 1

First and foremost, I would strongly advise you to not worry too much about the printed copies. Printed copies of any literature, not just your thesis, are largely vestigial these days: it is the electronic copy that people looking for literature will be able to discover, and it is the electronic copy that they will be generally capable of accessing. In my experience, the current purposes of the printed copy are:

1. Fulfilling depository requirements of libraries, where paper is still the best known method for long-term archival storage (even plain text files rot quickly---ever heard of EBCDIC?). In all likelihood, nobody will ever access these paper copies.
2. Giving "trophy" copies to people that you personally know, like your advisor, your family, or other mentors who have helped you.

Neither of these really needs correction: the library depository copies are likely write-only artifacts, and the trophy copies are going to people who already know you and are likely to laugh and sympathize with you over your typo rather than hold it against you.

What I think is worth getting corrected is any electronic version. For that, you need to talk to whoever is in charge of maintaining the electronic depository at your institution. Often, this is the librarians, and they will generally have a procedure for fixing errors---your error will by no means be the first or the most severe that they have dealt with.

Answer 2

I just thought it appropriate to reflect on what was done in this situation before we had word processors and text editing tools. At that time a University regulation/procedure for correcting an error in a thesis specified cut and paste. Real cut and paste. You typed up the word for the correction, cut it out of the paper with scissors or a craft knife and pasted it into the thesis over the offending error. Book binders even had a method of correcting typos made in the gold embossing used on the spine or cover.

The university library, and other parts of the university responsible for a thesis, I am sure, will be pleased to take an errata which can be pasted inside the thesis, but may also permit you to actually do cut and paste on the paper copy. They would want the copy preserved for all time to be correct.

However, like the other answerers, I would not be too concerned about this fault. It is very minor. I recently had the experience of OCR text recovery of my own thesis which was done before the days of word processing. I was shocked at the number of small typos that the OCR discovered that had been missed by the examiners, proof readers and myself. I have to live with the knowledge that all the typos are then in the paper copy in the library vaults for all time.....

Answer 3

Regardless of whether your thesis is published in print form or electronic one, I think that you can and should contact the publisher and your university and/or school (usually, either one and/or both maintain university- and/or school-wide electronic repositories of defended dissertations and theses, which are considered as unpublished artifacts in a traditional, peer-reviewed outlet, sense) with request to make the appropriate correction or publish an errata.

In addition to that, if your thesis has been submitted to nationwide or global e-repositories, such as ProQuest (AFAIK, it's pretty much a standard, at least for US academia, for maintaining and distributing Ph.D. dissertations, not so sure about other geographical destinations and Master's theses), you can and should contact them as well with the same request as one, mentioned above.

Answer 4

You should contact your thesis advisor and state briefly and clearly your mistake. They are the only person who can authoritatively tell you how to proceed and whether this could affect your grading at all.

Most likely, they will tell you to do nothing and regard the typo as a silly but minor mishap that could have occurred to anyone. As long as the rest of your thesis is flawless, don't fret.

If you worry about your thesis being published on a repository or university archive etc. with the flawed title page, your advisor can tell you whether it is possible to correct the "proof" before publication.

Answer 5

I don't think you need to worry: "implemenation" is similar enough to "implementation" that I don't think anybody will have any problem understanding what you intended (which is probably why nobody noticed the error earlier!), so I would leave it as is. If the typo is only on your front page, you can correct it by hand if you don't have too many copies to fix.