Every time you cite someone you choose a verb, and that verb commits you to a position on their work whether you meant it or not. Write “Sharma (2021) claims” and you have told your examiner you doubt Sharma. Write “demonstrates” and you have accepted the finding as proved. Neither is a small decision in a chapter that cites two hundred sources.
The table comes first, because that is the part you will keep open in another tab while you write. The families, the discipline conventions and the twelve-verb working set follow it.
The verb bank
| Verb | What it commits you to | Strength | Where it belongs | The risk |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| states, reports, describes | The source said this. You take no position. | Neutral | Literature review, background | Used everywhere, it flattens a review into a list |
| notes, observes | The source said this and it is worth noticing | Neutral, faintly positive | Literature review | Mild endorsement you may not intend |
| presents, outlines, sets out | The source offers a framework or model | Neutral | Theory section | Wrong for empirical findings |
| identifies, measures, estimates | The source did a specific technical thing | Neutral | Method, literature review | None; underused |
| found, reported finding | The source produced evidence | Medium | Literature review, discussion | Wrong for a purely theoretical paper |
| suggests, indicates | The evidence points this way, without closing the question | Medium-low | Discussion, literature review | None; the safest general-purpose verb |
| implies, points to | The inference is yours, not the source’s | Low | Discussion | Do not attribute the inference to the author |
| shows, showed | The evidence is good and you accept it | Medium-high | Discussion | You now own the finding too |
| demonstrates | The evidence is strong and the point is made | High | Discussion, sparingly | An examiner may ask whether the study earns the word |
| establishes | The question is settled | High | Only for a large replicated literature | Almost never true of one paper |
| confirms, corroborates | The source agrees with something already known | Medium | Discussion | Requires a prior finding you have actually cited |
| proposes, posits, puts forward | A theoretical move, no evidence claimed | Medium | Theory section | Wrong for empirical results |
| argues, contends, maintains | The source takes a position and defends it | Medium-high | Literature review, discussion | Only for a paper that actually argues |
| holds, takes the view that | A position, reported without heat | Medium | Humanities and theory | None |
| challenges, questions, disputes | The source disagrees with other work | Medium | Literature review | Name who is being disagreed with |
| refutes, contradicts | The source proved something wrong | High | Discussion, rarely | Refute means disproved, not disagreed |
| assumes | The source did not justify this | Negative, mild | Critique | Legitimate only when it is true |
| asserts | Stated without support | Negative, mild | Critique | Reads as criticism even when you did not mean it |
| claims | You doubt it | Negative, strong | Critique only | The single commonest accidental insult in a thesis |
| alleges, purports | You distrust it | Negative, very strong | Contested or retracted work | Reserve for genuine disputes of fact |
The five families, ranked by how often you should reach for them
- Tentative-evidential — suggests, indicates, found. Suits almost every sentence in a literature review and most of the discussion. Falls short when a finding really is decisive and you make it sound provisional; a genuinely strong result deserves a stronger verb once.
- Neutral report — states, reports, notes, describes, outlines. Suits background, definitions and method precedents, where your job is to record rather than judge. Falls short as the default for a whole chapter, because a review built entirely of neutral verbs takes no position and reads as an annotated bibliography.
- Argumentative — argues, contends, maintains, holds. Suits theoretical and policy literatures and any source that is making a case rather than reporting data. Falls short when applied to an empirical paper: a randomised trial does not argue, it finds.
- Strong evidential — demonstrates, shows, establishes, confirms. Suits the three or four findings your own argument leans on hardest. Falls short through repetition — used twenty times it stops meaning anything, and each use is a claim your examiner may test.
- Distancing — claims, asserts, assumes, alleges. Suits deliberate critique, which every good literature review contains some of. Falls short catastrophically when used by accident, because the reader assumes you meant it.
Why “claims” causes more trouble than any other verb
In everyday Indian English — and in journalism everywhere — claims is close to neutral. “The company claims a 40% improvement” is ordinary reporting. In academic English it is not neutral at all: it signals that the writer regards the statement as unsupported.
So a literature review that says “Gupta (2019) claims that microfinance improves household consumption” has, to an examiner, taken a position against Gupta — without a single sentence of justification for that position. If you did mean it, the sentence is fine and you owe the reader the reason in the next clause. If you did not, you have picked a fight you did not know you were in, possibly with someone your department knows.
The repair is a single search. Find every instance of claims, asserts and alleges in your document and ask, one at a time: do I actually doubt this? Keep the ones where the answer is yes and put the grounds beside them. Replace the rest with argues, states, reports or suggests depending on what the source was doing.
Two rules that are not preferences
The first is about proves. A single study does not prove a hypothesis; it produces evidence consistent with it. That is not a stylistic nicety but a statement about what inferential statistics can support, and it rules out proves and proved for a single study — which is exactly where an Indian thesis tends to reach for them. It is also why demonstrates and establishes should be rare rather than routine. Mathematics is the exception, where a proof is a technical object and the verb is literal.
The second is about who is doing the acting. A study cannot argue, control or interpret — researchers can. “The study argues” is weaker than “Sharma argues”, and the habit of attributing agency to documents produces sentences in which nobody is responsible for anything. Name the person. The same instinct favours the active voice: Sharma (2021) found reads better than it was found by Sharma (2021).
Neither of these is a house preference you can opt out of. But the document that binds you is your own department’s manual — where your department publishes one, it outranks any general guidance, including this page.
Does the citation style change the verb?
It changes how visible the author is, which changes how often you need a verb at all.
APA author-date makes the author a grammatical subject easily: Sharma (2021) found that…. This is the author-prominent or integral citation, and it is the form that needs a reporting verb.
IEEE numeric reduces the citation to a bracketed number, so the natural sentence becomes information-prominent: Adaptive routing reduces latency under load [12]. There is no reporting verb at all, and the stance moves into the main verb of your own sentence — which is why engineering theses can sound flat or, worse, can state a source’s finding as if it were established fact. When a source deserves attribution in IEEE, name the author in the sentence: Rao et al. propose an adaptive scheme [12].
Vancouver behaves like IEEE. The comparison of what each style actually requires of an Indian thesis is set out in our guide to choosing between APA, IEEE, MLA and Vancouver, and the mechanics of APA entries in our guide to citing in APA style for an Indian university thesis.
The working rule: use an integral citation with a reporting verb when the who matters — a landmark study, a position you will argue with, a method you are borrowing. Use a non-integral citation when the what matters and three sources say the same thing.
Which verbs does your discipline expect?
Conventions differ, and the difference is real enough that using the wrong family marks a thesis as written outside its field.
- Engineering, computer science, technology: propose, present, introduce, implement, evaluate, report, achieve, outperform. Argument verbs are rare; the literature is a sequence of contributions rather than a debate.
- Management and commerce: find, examine, investigate, argue, posit, model, test. A hybrid literature, and the family you choose should follow the individual paper.
- Education, sociology, psychology: argue, contend, suggest, report, find, theorise, problematise. Argument verbs are normal because much of the literature is arguing.
- Life and health sciences: report, observe, find, show, demonstrate, associate — and a strong preference for association language over causal language. Note that demonstrate is more freely used here than elsewhere.
- Humanities: argue, hold, read, interpret, contend, trace. The present tense is normal for a text’s argument, and the writer’s own position is expected to be visible.
The most reliable calibration is not this list. Take three recent papers from the journal you intend to publish in, highlight every reporting verb on the first two pages, and count the families. That is your field’s distribution, measured rather than assumed.
Six verbs and phrases to strike from an Indian thesis
- opined. Legal and journalistic register in Indian English; almost never appears in international academic writing. Use argued or held.
- told, said. These report speech. A journal article is not speech. Use wrote, reported or argued. The exception is genuine interview data, where said is correct.
- talks about, speaks about, deals with. Vague and informal, and they carry no stance at all. Name what the source does: tests, models, reviews, compares.
- throws light on, sheds light on. A metaphor doing the work a verb should do. Say what the source showed.
- highlighted. Not wrong, but so overused in Indian literature reviews that it becomes invisible. Vary it, or better, replace it with a verb that says whether evidence was involved.
- delved into, endeavoured to. Ornamental. Both belong to the class of figurative and elevated language that formal academic prose avoids.
These are register problems rather than grammar problems, and they travel with a broader set of constructions covered in our guide to Indian English in a PhD thesis and what examiners actually flag.
The recommendation: twelve verbs are enough
You do not need the whole table. A thesis that uses these twelve accurately reads better than one that reaches for variety:
reports · notes · describes · presents · found · suggests · indicates · argues · contends · shows · demonstrates · challenges
Add claims, asserts and assumes only where you are deliberately critical, and establishes and confirms only where a replicated literature earns them. Repetition of an accurate verb is not a stylistic fault. Substituting an inaccurate synonym to avoid repetition is.
How to audit your own literature review in twenty minutes
- Highlight every reporting verb in one chapter. Do one chapter, not the whole thesis, or you will not finish.
- Count the families. If more than about two-thirds are neutral-report verbs, your review is describing rather than synthesising — the structural fix is in our guide to writing a literature review for a PhD thesis in India.
- Check every distancing verb. Every claims, asserts, alleges and assumes: intended, or accident?
- Check every strong evidential verb. For each demonstrates, proves, establishes: could you defend that word if an examiner stopped on it? If not, drop a rung to shows or suggests.
- Check the verbs attached to your own findings. The discussion chapter is where an overclaiming verb costs most, and the four-move pattern that keeps interpretation bounded is set out in our guide to turning results into argument.
Getting the verb right the first time
Auditing verbs after the fact works, but it is a second pass over a chapter you have already written twice. The cheaper version is to have the stance decided at the moment you write the sentence, which means having the source, its evidence and its strength in front of you rather than in your memory of a PDF you read in March.
Tesify keeps every claim attached to the source it came from while the chapter grows, so the sentence you write about a study is written next to what that study actually found. The judgement about how strongly to put it stays yours — which is the part an examiner is testing.
Build your literature review with Tesify
Frequently asked questions
What is a reporting verb?
The verb you attach to a cited source to say what that source did — found, argued, suggested, demonstrated. It is the smallest unit of stance in academic writing, because it tells the reader both what the source did and what you think of it, in one word.
Is it wrong to use “claims” in a literature review?
Not wrong, but rarely what the writer intends. In academic English it signals that you regard the statement as unsupported. Use it deliberately, with your grounds in the next clause, or replace it with argues, states or suggests.
Which reporting verb is safest if I am unsure?
Suggests, for a finding that points in a direction, and reports, for a fact the source recorded. Both are accurate about a wide range of sources and neither commits you to a position you have not defended.
Should reporting verbs be in past or present tense?
Conventions differ by discipline and by style manual, and your department’s manual decides. What matters far more is consistency within a section: a paragraph that moves between “Sharma finds” and “Sharma found” without reason reads as unedited.
Can I use “proves” about a study in my thesis?
Avoid it outside mathematics, where a proof is a technical object and the verb is literal. A single study produces evidence consistent with a hypothesis rather than proof of it, and an examiner who stops on the word will ask you to defend it.
How many different reporting verbs should a thesis use?
Around a dozen, used accurately. Reaching for synonyms to avoid repetition is how an inaccurate verb enters a chapter, and an examiner notices the inaccuracy long before they notice the repetition.
Do reporting verbs matter in an IEEE-style engineering thesis?
They matter differently. Numeric citation makes it easy to state a source’s finding as bare fact, which quietly turns other people’s results into settled knowledge. When attribution matters, name the author in the sentence rather than relying on the bracket alone.
Is “highlighted” acceptable?
It is grammatical and it is not an error. It is simply worn out through overuse in Indian literature reviews, and it carries no information about whether evidence was involved. A more specific verb does more work in the same space.
What verb should I use for a thesis I found on Shodhganga?
The same verbs you would use for any other source, chosen by what the thesis did. A doctoral thesis that ran a survey found something; one that develops a framework proposes something. The format of the source does not change the stance.
Will my examiner really notice the verb?
Examiners notice distancing verbs and overclaiming verbs reliably, because both create a question they can ask. A misplaced neutral verb passes unremarked. That is why the audit above checks only two families rather than every sentence.
Does this apply to an M.Tech dissertation or a project report?
Yes, though the useful set is narrower. Engineering reports lean on propose, present, implement, evaluate and report, and the distancing family is rarely needed at all.