How to Write a Research Proposal

A research proposal is a document that gives a detailed description of a planned research project. They're required across all disciplines and can serve a number of purposes. For students, they're the first step in the research process and are required for dissertations and theses; you'll likely need to submit one early in your graduate school career, and you might need one for undergraduate projects as well. The proposals will usually need to be approved by a committee or professor before you can begin your work. If you're working with human or animal subjects, a research proposal is also needed to get certification from an institutional review board. Outside of school, research proposals are often required when applying for positions at research institutions.

The style of your research paper will likely depend on your chosen field, but there are a few general rules. Since a research proposal is discussing research you haven't done yet, it should be written in the future tense (for example, "the treatment will be administered once a week"), and, as with all academic writing, the wording should be clear and concise. Also keep in mind that the audience for your paper may be a committee that includes members who are not specialists in your research topic, which means you need to be diligent about providing background information and definitions in your proposal.

A research proposal is organized similarly to a research paper or journal article that uses the IMRAD (introduction, methodology, results, and discussion) method, but with a few important difference.

Start your proposal with an introduction that provides the background for your research. You want to explain to the reader where this study fits in the existing research landscape and thus why it's important. Remember, the point of a research proposal is to persuade the reader to endorse your work, which means they need a detailed explanation not only of your research topic, but also its larger significance. A good introduction will include all of the following:

The purpose of a literature review is to give the reader an overview of the previous work that's been done relating to your topic. It's generally organized chronologically by concept, but it shouldn't just be a list of publications. Think of it as like telling a story: you want to narrate the history of your chosen topic by citing important developments. Make sure to include seminal publications as well as any current research taking place, and provide critical commentary that shows you understand why what you cite is important. And always, always make sure you've been thorough. A research proposal that leaves out key articles or studies looks incomplete and unprofessional, and is going to be turned down.

Next, you need to tell the reader how you'll be conducting your research. The methodology (or materials and methods) section should be extremely detailed, even more so than in a research paper. The people evaluating your proposal need to see exactly how you plan to address your research question in order to be able to evaluate your research plan and determine whether your research strategy is sound. A good rule of thumb is that the person reading the methodology should be able to replicate the experiment. This means you need to give the details of the experimental design, what materials you used, your data collection methods, and the method of statistical analysis. You should also include a short discussion on why this particular experimental design or methodology was chosen over the alternatives.

Obviously since you haven't performed the study yet you don't have any data to report. Instead, the results section of a proposal should discuss your expected results. Explain how you plan to analyze the data you collect and how that analysis will help answer your research question, then explicitly tie the data you expect to find back to your research question and the broader topic. This section usually functions as your conclusion, so it's a good time to summarize what you hope to achieve.

Include a list of all the works you cited in the text.

Depending on guidelines for you proposal, you may be asked to include one or more of these other sections.

If you're writing for a committee, make sure you know as much as you can about the people who will be evaluating your work. Do they have the background necessary to understand your topic? If not, you need to include enough information in your proposal for them to feel comfortable evaluating your work. If they have particular specialties, be prepared to answer questions related to those topics.

Remember that you're not alone in this process. If you get stuck, ask your advisor for help and get feedback on the effectiveness of your proposal. Also talk with other students who have submitted proposals to get a feel for how the committee will evaluate yours.

This is a research project that you'll be working on for months or years, so stay organized while you work. Use a program like EndNote to manage your references and keep copies of all your drafts as you update them. You need to be able to keep you advisor up to date on your project, and chronicling the evolution of your project is an integral part of the proposal.

The more work you do on your proposal, the easier your research and final paper will be. A thorough literature review will ensure you're not scrambling to rethink your work when you discover you've missed something, while a well-thought out and detailed methodology will make it easier to conduct your research. Remember, this is the first step on a long road, so take the time to get it done right.

Because a research proposal is organized like a research paper, a lot of the material from your proposal can be used later when you write your final paper. While there's nothing wrong with this, you should careful not to just blindly cut and paste. There are lots of differences between a proposal and a research paper, including the tense and the detail required in the methodology section, which means you need to edit everything you reuse carefully.