The invention discloses an automatic academic dissertation format detecting method, and belongs to the technical field of computers. A unit positioning module, a format extracting module and a comparison module are involved in the method. The unit positioning module comprises eleven submodules having the function of finding eleven specific parts in an academic dissertation respectively and the length of each eleven specific part; the format extracting module comprises a paragraph attribute extracting submodule and a special format attribute extracting submodule and has the function of obtaining the type of each specific part in the dissertation; the comparison module comprises a rule configuration file, a rule comparison submodule and a report generation submodule and has the functions of comparing the format characteristics, extracted by the format extracting module, in the dissertation to be detected with the rule in a dissertation template and writing the format problem of inconsistent comparison results into a detection report. The automatic academic dissertation format detecting method is capable of automatically detecting the format of the academic dissertation submitted by a graduate to complete automatic format detection, finds all the parts not meeting the format requirement and provides the error reports.