This innovative practice paper examines the impact of structured guidance on students’ thesis work process. Many engineering students focus on their professional future, and therefore do not understand the need to learn to research. Yet, the universities’ strong emphasis on scientific research, and the need for new generations of researchers requires that research skills are embedded also in the engineering curricula even at undergraduate level. As many engineering students are reluctant to read and write, the development of their scientific literacy skills requires many kinds of support. This paper describes pedagogical interventions implemented in a mechanical engineering bachelor’s thesis course to improve the quality of references of the theses and the completion of the thesis process in time. It also discusses the effects of systematic scaffolding of information literacy. Results show that the guided thesis process significantly improved the completion of bachelor’s thesis in the given time frame. However, statistically significant improvement in the quality and quantity of cited references could not be observed. This indicates that adding teaching sessions on information retrieval, scientific referencing, and scientific writing is not sufficient without close connection to the actual thesis supervision process performed by faculty.