What to include in your Research Degree proposal

What to include: A clear and concise title for your project.

Advice and guidance: The title is provisional at this stage; it can change.

What to include: The key question or hypothesis that drives the research.

Advice and guidance: You might consider having a main question with a small number of sub-questions following from it. Use the question to define the central concern of this research.

What to include: A short overview of the research.

Advice and guidance:  Think about what is feasible in a project of this length; your research should balance focus and achievability with scope and ambition. You could look at other PhD projects in your field to get an idea of what is appropriate.

Ask yourself, ‘so what?’; why is this research important, and who will be interested in it?

You will expand on the details in this summary in the sections below.

What to include: Clear and concise aims and objectives.

Advice and guidance:  Your aims and objectives will sum up how you will set about answering your research question. Remember, aims are what you want to achieve; objectives are the steps or actions you will take to achieve the aims.

What to include: A short overview of the key sources relevant to your proposal, outlining the existing state of knowledge and including a summary of the gap in the knowledge that your research will fill.

Advice and guidance: Your review might just cover texts (written academic outputs such as books, chapters or journal papers). If your proposal looks at creative practice or includes practice research as a method or outcome, you might also include non-text sources (artworks or other creative works) in your review.

Use the review to demonstrate that you already have some expertise in your research area and can identify the most important precedents and contexts to your research.

You should be able to identify the space or gap in the existing research that you will address. The key PhD criterion is that you make an ‘original contribution to knowledge’ and you cannot make such a contribution unless you are aware of what other researchers have done before you—and what they have not done. Your contribution can be specific and focused; you do not need to over claim the importance of your research.

What to include:  An outline of the specific methods you will use to gather evidence and generate new knowledge.

Advice and guidance: Here are some useful questions to ask yourself:

• What discipline or sub-disciplines is your research located in, and how do researchers in this discipline go about conducting their research?
• What are your main sources of evidence or data?
• What are your main theoretical or conceptual tools?
• Are there any ethical issues that you will need to consider?
• Will you need any specialist facilities or equipment?

What to include: An overview of what you will do and when you will do it.

Advice and guidance: Use this to demonstrate that you can realistically plan a project of this scale. If you are applying to study full-time, you will be expected to complete your research in three years; if part-time, you will have five years.

What to include: A list of key sources.

Advice and guidance: This should include the sources discussed in your literature / contextual review and any others that evidence your knowledge.