A good proposal will take you a long way down the road towards completing your thesis or dissertation in a reasonable time. In doing your proposal you develop a good understanding of what you are going to do in your research and how you are going to do it.
Preparing your proposal starts with identifying your topic. While you are choosing your topic you should also be starting to come to terms with the literature in the chosen area/field. Typically one would start off with a fairly broad research idea. Reading the literature in the field will allow you to focus that to a much more explicit and focussed research question or aim. The reading you do will help you build a solid background in the area that you will be working in and will inform you of what has been done in the area and what the gaps are (where you could make a contribution).
Once you have identified a good focussed research question or aim, then you should start to think about how you would answer the question. This might mean breaking your research question down into even more focussed subquestions where answering a subquestion would help you to answer your main research question.
To identify answer your research question[s] you need a methodology. The methodology required depends on your research question[s] (or aim), your reseach framework, the area that you are working in, etc. but you will always have a methodology and being explicit about your methodology and developing this as completely as you can at the proposal stage will help you when you are actually doing the research. The literature that you have read should guide you in choosing an appropriate framework and from that developing a detailed research methodology.
Most universities have good libraries and good resources but as a student (or researcher) it is often hard to make the best use of those resources because the task is something that you do not do regularly and has a fairly steep learning curve. Fortunately, most universities also have good (often great, committed, etc.) library staff who can help you make the best use of the resources. Make an appointment to see your librarian to find out how they can help you to be a better researcher.
One of the hardest parts about developing a good proposal is to develop a good literature review. Writing a good literature requires you to understand the literature in your chosen field and to be able to present it in a coherent fashion. You should not just be grouping a lot of summaries of papers together. You need to be able to synthesise what you have read and arranging the presentation so that like concepts are grouped together.
The "old fashioned" way of doing this would be to have your list of references and for each reference to write each concept/idea on a small card. You can then arrange the cards so that concepts are grouped into small piles of cards. You then develop your literature by writing about each pile of cards.
A reference manager tool can help you in doing this more easily. Use the available tools! They can make your life much easier!
Note: It is also possible to do this using LaTeX and bibtex by using the annote field in each bibitem. In that field you can add notes about the concepts covered in each paper and then can use these notes to link references.
See the useful links page for more information about doing a literature review.
There are many different places that literature/information/knowledge can be found.
Note that it is up to you to attempt to judge the worth or value of any "publication". Just because something has been published does not mean that it is correct or worthwhile.
Takes time and effort and requires you to assess the worth of what you find...
How?????
As mentioned elsewhere an annotated bibliography can be used to "arrange" your background literature. For each paper you need to have
For those students who used LaTeX for their document preparation, LaTeX and Bibtex can be used to build an annotated bibliography.
(Note that other tools can also be used to do this.)
For example, your bibtex item could be as shown below:
@article{Cast95,
author = "Castellani, I.",
title = "Observing distribution in processes: static and dynamic localities",
journal = "International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science",
volume = 6,
number = 4,
year = 1995,
pages = "353-393",
annote = "\ \\
\textbf{Aim:} To investigate distribution in CCS,
by considering the use of locations statically (where
locations are associated with processes) rather than
dynamically (where locations are associated with actions). \\ \\
\textbf{Style/Type:} journal article, theoretical. \\ \\
\textbf{Cross references:} In \citet{Boud:91}, locations
are dealt with dynamically, since whenever an action
...
This research extends CCS \citep{Miln89}. \\ \\
\textbf{Summary:} The syntax of processes is the same as
that of CCS but extended with a location prefix operator
...
local causality. \\ \\"
}
There are many different types of Bibtex entries -- make sure that you choose the appropriate ones for the references that you are going to use.
The structure of a proposal document (by Ian Sanders)
A typical proposal could be of the form below.
Note that various institutions have their own requirements for proposals which may be quite different from the framework given above. Unisa, in particular, has a very different required form for proposals. See the Unisa specific page for more details. The information which should appear in any proposal is, however, the same and the intention of the proposal is the same - to plan your research before you start and to convince others (examiners) that your research in feasible and useful!
More comments on the research proposal structure (by Ian Sanders, Vashti Galpin and Philip Machanick)
These comments were originally aimed at Honours level research proposals but apply equally to masters and doctoral proposals.
The details presented here give a skeleton for you to work from in your document. These are guidelines only -- they will not apply and probably cannot be forced to apply for all research proposals. Part of your task as a student is to decide how to use these guidelines in preparing your document. You should discuss your ideas for the structure of your document with your supervisor.
Below is a suggested chapter structure for a research proposal. For each chapter, details of what should appear in the chapter are given. In the proposal document and in the final report, dissertation or thesis, the first three chapters are very similar in structure -- this is because the same type of scene-setting is required for the later material in both documents.
Note that there are possible variations on the suggested structures. For example, in the research report, future work could be discussed in a separate chapter before the conclusion. For some types of research, it may make sense to combine the results and discussion chapters in a research report. It is up to you to make reasonable decisions, and your supervisor will be able to advise you on this.
Abstract
The function of an abstract is to allow a reader to determine whether a document is relevant, and hence the major points of the document should be covered including scope and conclusions. It should be short, informative, specific, self-contained and written for a general audience. It should not include abbreviations or citations. Your document should not refer to the abstract.
Acknowledgments
Although you will have done the majority of the work on your own, you will have had help from your supervisors, your classmates and your friends and family. This is where you get the chance to express your gratitude to them.
Also you may have received some sort of financial assistance. This should also be acknowledged here.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction
This chapter should introduce the problem at a level that could be understood by any intelligent outsider (anybody with a degree in any area is a good target to aim at). It should include sections which define the problem, discuss the importance of the problem, give some idea of how you will tackle the problem and could even give some idea of the results you aim for and the likely significance of these results. In this chapter, you must also give a good idea of the overall structure of your document. \\
Chapter 2. Background and Related Work
In this chapter you should elaborate on (or give details of) the problem and discuss why it is an important problem to tackle. You should then discuss related literature in the area.
The aim here is to give your reader a detailed picture of what has been done in the past and how it relates to what you plan to do. You should discuss the background to the problem, alternative and related approaches and why they are significant to your problem (what they are, what you learn from them and how they can be used to solve your problem).
Chapter 3. Research Method
Here you should spell out in detail exactly what problem you are trying to solve and how you will set about tackling this. The first part of this can be accomplished by formulating a clear and precise hypothesis which can be tested. It could also be accomplished by coming up with a clear and precise research question which can be answered. Your research hypothesis or question should be motivated -- it should be made clear why you have chosen that specific hypothesis or question.
The second part of this is accomplished by designing an experiment to attempt to verify your hypothesis or answer your research question. Here you must give details of what you plan to do, why you will do it and how it will answer your research question or lead to acceptance or rejection of your hypothesis. Exactly what appears here depends on what type of research you plan to do.
Chapter 4. Research Plan
This chapter should make the general approach of Chapter 3 more concrete. Here you should discuss more specifically how you plan to do the research. You should make the risks clear, and how you will manage them. It is important to elaborate on what will be delivered and how each deliverable will relate to the research goals. If the hypothesis is clear and testable, the rest follows relatively straightforwardly. You should give a time plan as a table containing specific dates and specific deliverables broken down in reasonable detail so it is clear whether you are on track or not as the research progresses. Vague deliverables like ``research'' and time periods like ``3 weeks'' will not suffice.
References
A list of the works you cited in the prescribed format.