Short But Smart .. How To Write Research Proposal
Tips for Writing Your Research Proposal
1. Know yourself:
Know your area of expertise, what are your strengths and what are your weaknesses. Play to your strengths, not to your weaknesses. If you want to get into a new area of research, learn something about the area before you write a proposal. Research previous work. Be a scholar.
2. Know the program from which you seek support:
You are responsible for finding the appropriate program for support of your research.
3. Read the program announcement:
Programs and special activities have specific goals and specific requirements. If you don’t meet those goals and requirements, you have thrown out your chance of success. Read the announcement for what it says, not for what you want it to say. If your research does not fit easily within the scope of the topic areas outlined, your chance of success is nil.
4. Formulate an appropriate research objective:
A research proposal is a proposal to conduct research, not to conduct development or design or some other activity. Research is a methodical process of building upon previous knowledge to derive or discover new knowledge, that is, something that isn’t known before the research is conducted.
5. Develop a viable research plan:
A viable research plan is a plan to accomplish your research objective that has a non-zero probability of success. The focus of the plan must be to accomplish the research objective.
6. State your research objective clearly in your proposal:
A good research proposal includes a clear statement of the research objective. Early in the proposal is better than later in the proposal. The first sentence of the proposal is a good place. A good first sentence might be, “The research objective of this proposal is...” Do not use the word “develop” in the statement of your research objective.
7. Frame your project around the work of others:
Remember that research builds on the extant knowledge base, that is, upon the work of others. Be sure to frame your project appropriately, acknowledging the current limits of knowledge and making clear your contribution to the extension of these limits. Be sure that you include references to the extant work of others.
8. Grammar and spelling count:
Proposals are not graded on grammar. But if the grammar is not perfect, the result is ambiguities left to the reviewer to resolve. Ambiguities make the proposal difficult to read and often impossible to understand, and often result in low ratings. Be sure your grammar is perfect.
9. Format and brevity are important:
Do not feel that your proposal is rated based on its weight. Use 12-point fonts, use easily legible fonts, and use generous margins. Take pity on the reviewers. Make your proposal a pleasant reading experience that puts important concepts up front and makes them clear. Use figures appropriately to make and clarify points, but not as filler.
10. Know the review process: Know how your proposal will be reviewed before you write it. Proposals that are reviewed by panels must be written to a broader audience than proposals that will be reviewed by mail. Mail review can seek out reviewers with very specific expertise in very narrow disciplines.
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11. Proof read your proposal before it is sent:
Many proposals are sent out with idiotic mistakes, omissions, and errors of all sorts. Proposals have been submitted with the list of references omitted and with the references not referred to. Proposals have been submitted to the wrong program. Proposals have been submitted with misspellings in the title. These proposals were not successful. Stupid things like this kill a proposal. It is easy to catch them with a simple, but careful, proof reading. Don’t spend six or eight weeks writing a proposal just to kill it with stupid mistakes that are easily prevented.
12. Submit your proposal on time:
Why work for two months on a proposal just to have it disqualified for being late? Remember, fairness dictates that proposal submission rules must apply to everyone. It is not up to the discretion of the program officer to grant you dispensation on deadlines. Get your proposal in two or three days before the deadline.
Example:
Title: Design and Simulation of Mobile Sensor Networks
1) Mobile Sensor Networks (MSN)
Google MSN and try to grab some basic concepts of the area. Review some current state of art, write a short motivation for your project with a brief introduction to the domain of Mobile Sensor Networks.
2) State of the art for modeling and simulation.
Find out some state of the art techniques and approaches used for the modeling and simulation of Mobile sensor networks. You will find different approaches used by the research community to model and simulate MSN. List them down and IF you have time, briefly compare them.
3) Objective
State your objective clearly regarding the design and simulation of mobile sensor networks and which key factors of the network will you use to evaluate the simulation.
4)Simulation Platform
A brief comparison of different simulation platforms used to simulate MSN will be enought at this stage i guess.
5) References.
Remember to give a list of references you use during the making of proposal.
In the end its just an abstract idea
1. Know yourself:
Know your area of expertise, what are your strengths and what are your weaknesses. Play to your strengths, not to your weaknesses. If you want to get into a new area of research, learn something about the area before you write a proposal. Research previous work. Be a scholar.
2. Know the program from which you seek support:
You are responsible for finding the appropriate program for support of your research.
3. Read the program announcement:
Programs and special activities have specific goals and specific requirements. If you don’t meet those goals and requirements, you have thrown out your chance of success. Read the announcement for what it says, not for what you want it to say. If your research does not fit easily within the scope of the topic areas outlined, your chance of success is nil.
4. Formulate an appropriate research objective:
A research proposal is a proposal to conduct research, not to conduct development or design or some other activity. Research is a methodical process of building upon previous knowledge to derive or discover new knowledge, that is, something that isn’t known before the research is conducted.
5. Develop a viable research plan:
A viable research plan is a plan to accomplish your research objective that has a non-zero probability of success. The focus of the plan must be to accomplish the research objective.
6. State your research objective clearly in your proposal:
A good research proposal includes a clear statement of the research objective. Early in the proposal is better than later in the proposal. The first sentence of the proposal is a good place. A good first sentence might be, “The research objective of this proposal is...” Do not use the word “develop” in the statement of your research objective.
7. Frame your project around the work of others:
Remember that research builds on the extant knowledge base, that is, upon the work of others. Be sure to frame your project appropriately, acknowledging the current limits of knowledge and making clear your contribution to the extension of these limits. Be sure that you include references to the extant work of others.
8. Grammar and spelling count:
Proposals are not graded on grammar. But if the grammar is not perfect, the result is ambiguities left to the reviewer to resolve. Ambiguities make the proposal difficult to read and often impossible to understand, and often result in low ratings. Be sure your grammar is perfect.
9. Format and brevity are important:
Do not feel that your proposal is rated based on its weight. Use 12-point fonts, use easily legible fonts, and use generous margins. Take pity on the reviewers. Make your proposal a pleasant reading experience that puts important concepts up front and makes them clear. Use figures appropriately to make and clarify points, but not as filler.
10. Know the review process: Know how your proposal will be reviewed before you write it. Proposals that are reviewed by panels must be written to a broader audience than proposals that will be reviewed by mail. Mail review can seek out reviewers with very specific expertise in very narrow disciplines.
.
11. Proof read your proposal before it is sent:
Many proposals are sent out with idiotic mistakes, omissions, and errors of all sorts. Proposals have been submitted with the list of references omitted and with the references not referred to. Proposals have been submitted to the wrong program. Proposals have been submitted with misspellings in the title. These proposals were not successful. Stupid things like this kill a proposal. It is easy to catch them with a simple, but careful, proof reading. Don’t spend six or eight weeks writing a proposal just to kill it with stupid mistakes that are easily prevented.
12. Submit your proposal on time:
Why work for two months on a proposal just to have it disqualified for being late? Remember, fairness dictates that proposal submission rules must apply to everyone. It is not up to the discretion of the program officer to grant you dispensation on deadlines. Get your proposal in two or three days before the deadline.
Example:
Title: Design and Simulation of Mobile Sensor Networks
1) Mobile Sensor Networks (MSN)
Google MSN and try to grab some basic concepts of the area. Review some current state of art, write a short motivation for your project with a brief introduction to the domain of Mobile Sensor Networks.
2) State of the art for modeling and simulation.
Find out some state of the art techniques and approaches used for the modeling and simulation of Mobile sensor networks. You will find different approaches used by the research community to model and simulate MSN. List them down and IF you have time, briefly compare them.
3) Objective
State your objective clearly regarding the design and simulation of mobile sensor networks and which key factors of the network will you use to evaluate the simulation.
4)Simulation Platform
A brief comparison of different simulation platforms used to simulate MSN will be enought at this stage i guess.
5) References.
Remember to give a list of references you use during the making of proposal.
In the end its just an abstract idea
Guidelines for writing Research Article
During recent days, I have received multiple queries asking for help in writing research articles as it is important factor in getting PhD scholarship abroad. So, just to help everyone I am writing guidelines and my opinion, feel free to improve these or suggest better alternatives.
In my opinion, to write research article scholar first should read loads of article in same domain as his/her research area. By doing so, two important milestones are achieved:
1. Writers need to read. A lot. Magazines. Books. Periodicals. And so on. They need to grasp the art of language, to appreciate the finer points of words. As they read, they should jot down ideas and capture thoughts as they come. Nothing inspires a writer like reading someone else’s words.
2. “State of the art / literature review” section can be written in appropriate manner with full command over what has already been published.
I know in Pakistan sometimes supervisor don’t point students to good repositories of research articles and stick to what is not considered as state of the art but students/scholars should also strive for the excellence (specially, Masters level scholars who are aspiring to be researchers).
Now the structure of article:
Generally in computer science when we write article, we have following structure in our mind:
1. Introduction
a. Introducing problem
b. Problem impact on society / science
c. Novelty of proposed solution / study
2. State of the art / literature review
This is bit tricky section as you can review literature from last 100 years or may be last 10 years. You can be creative how you present literature to the reader. You can organize literature review in subsections based on certain dividing criteria. In your case you can have subsections dealing with qualitative and quantitative analysis, for example. And here you can also write what is lacking in current studies and thus you can show how important is your research.
3. Proposed solution / methodology
In this section you write what you have done. Here you describe solution / methodology adopted /steps carried out etc. This section is your actual work, so you can be innovative here. Draw figures to show steps carried out and similar things.
4. Results and analysis
As the section name suggests, here you pen down results drawn from the study. You can show results by using many techniques, for example, graphs, statistical analysis, charts etc. In computer science it is important to compare your results with other state of the art methods as well. But I am not sure about economics or social sciences.
5. Conclusion and future work
In the last you conclude study with briefly writing importance and result of your study. Then you can suggest the way forward.
For reference you can have a look at my webpage of publications. You can see most of my publications in pdf there: https://sites.google.com/site/drkhanrizwan17/publications
Specifically, you can have a look at this publication of mine to see how research articles are structured: http://liris.cnrs.fr/Documents/Liris-6022.pdf
Last comment:
One thing which is very important in writing research article is to keep in mind readers. When researcher writes an article, he/she usually have worked on the problems for months or years. Thus, many terminologies that are straight forward to him/her are as obscured as Bermuda triangle to readers. So, whenever you use some terminology or reference some one's work, write 1-2 lines to give a gist of it. Secondly, try to break long and complex sentence in small and more comprehensible, so that even a novice can get you.
