Research Proposal

Research Proposal, Part 1

It is a great help to write a proposal (even if you don't need any money), because it forces you to think clearly about what you are going to do. You will do the proposal over two weeks, and this page describes the first part. There is a link on the homepage to sample proposals.

Step 1: Finding a good topic

Your project must be designed around a research QUESTION. Research questions are most useful and interesting if they are derived from (or can be related to) a body of theory. This makes the results generalizable, hence of interest to a wider range of researchers, and potentially predictive of what might be found in different populations. Most empirical scientific research will also pose one or more specific hypotheses.

I would prefer that you work on something that you are genuinely interested in or that you will find useful. This could mean that you are testing out methods you will use later in a different population for thesis work. It could mean that you are looking at something new that, if it turns out well, you can work on next semester and turn into a UROP project or a publishable paper. Or it could be more exploratory, but still relevant to your career goals somehow. The only requirement is that it shouldn't be a waste of your time. Send me an email if you want to discuss any of this.

Step 2: Introduction

The first part of a proposal is the introduction. Write a paragraph describing your research question, and how this project fits into it. Include hypotheses if you have them.

Step 3: Background

The next part of a proposal is usual called "background" or "background and significance." This requires a literature search, so let's discuss that first.

3a: Doing the literature search

Use at least two different electronic databases to research your topic, find three to five usable references, and read (or skim) them If this topic is old news to you and you are very familiar with the literature, try to find some new sources. Pay attention to the methods used, because you may want to model your study on them. Use the guidance below if you are not familiar with how to use electronic databases.

The two most useful publicly-available databases are www.scholar.google.com for everything, and medline, available publicly as www.pubmed.gov, for anything biomedical. Other databases are available by going to the Marriott library homepage and clicking on the "Research Databases" tab on the top (also on the left-hand side). Academic Search Premier is a good and very broad database. Click on "off-campus access" (blue bar at the top) to access databases and more from home.

Google Scholar, Pubmed, and Scopus (available through Marriott) differ from many other databases because they allow you to see which articles have cited the article you are looking at. This type of forward search is hugely valuable in getting you current on the literature. They are also very broad in coverage.

3b: Writing the background section

You will use the results of your literature search to write the next part of your proposal. The aim of the background section is to show how the proposed research fits into existing knowledge and how it will answer questions that have arisen from earlier work. It should be tailored to your research question. it is not a general tutorial on the topic.

Write up the background section as described above. This is a preliminary project and I am not expecting anything grand or in depth. Make it short (maximum one page).