Writing a Research Proposal

Faced with writing a research proposal for the first time, it's easy to feel apprehensive.  This blogpost is not intended to replace any advice you're given by teaching staff, but we can offer a few helpful general comments.  

We realise you could be contemplating research on a vast variety of topics, from many different disciplines.  Our students here at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland are creative artists in some aspect of music, drama, dance, film or television, and much of our research is practice-based.  (This may be very different from the research that a scientist, mathematician, lawyer or linguist might undertake!)
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An Outline for a Practice-Based Research Project Proposal

The following outline was recommended for a recent RCS Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching.  Candidates were advised to aim for a proposal with a word-length of about 1000 words:-

1. Overview
2. Research Context
3. Professional Aims
4. Research Question/Questions
5. Methodology
6. Outcomes

 Check with teaching staff to see if there are particular things they're looking out for.  Also, see if you should write it in the first person (eg, "I propose to find out ...") or the more formal third person (eg, "It is proposed to establish...".)   Perhaps you can find a doctoral student or recent PhD graduate willing to show you how they wrote their own research proposal.
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Books and Articles about Writing a Research Proposal

Your library has plenty of literature to help you with your task.  Maybe you just want to be sure that you haven't missed out something vital.  Or need a bit more guidance about structuring your report. Start with the library catalogue.   
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Catalogue or Catalogue Plus?

•  Click here for the link to the Whittaker Library Catalogue

1. You can search books and e-books in the simple catalogue search-box
2. Or you can click the "Search Catalogue Plus" button BENEATH the search box, and then type in your search-terms. This will search all the online resources that we subscribe to.

Typing words in the search-box can be made more efficient by using some clever search tricks. Here's how we did our initial search:-

Writing AND "Research proposal"

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Combining terms with AND is a good way of ensuring relevant results.  Also, if you want words to be adjacent or very close together, quotation marks do the trick.  Here, we've combined two different concepts. You don't just want to read someone else's "research proposal" - you want to know about writing your own. Try the above search-string in the Catalogue, and then using Catalogue Plus - you'll see how many more results you can get with Catalogue Plus!

Another good search to try is this one (in fact, you might find enough here in a simple library catalogue search, to answer all your initial questions!) :-

Research methodology

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Combining search terms

By the way, typing the word AND in block capitals is one of three search strategies that work in this way.  There's also OR, where you would be happy with either of two or more terms.  Lastly, you can exclude concepts with NOT.  This is useful if you know you do not want to retrieve material on a particular sub-category.  (AND, OR and NOT are called Boolean operators.  Too much information?!)

Happy searching, and happy research proposal writing! Good luck!