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!

Librarian Leading AHRC Research Network

One of our librarians is Principal Investigator for the Claimed From Stationers Hall music research network, which is funded by the AHRC.  It's about Georgian and early Victorian music deposited in libraries around the country under legal deposit legislation. 

If you're interested to see what the research network is doing, here's a link to their blog:-
https://claimedfromstationershall.wordpress.com/ 

Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century - New Online Resource

The University of Glasgow has this week launched a great new resource about songs by Robert Burns. Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century is an AHRC-funded Project to produce a multi-volume edition of the Works of Robert Burns. It's led by Kirsteen McCue,

Professor of Scottish Literature & Song Culture and Co-Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies in the Scottish Literature Department.

There's lots to explore.  It all started with this:- 

"The Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow recently secured a major AHRC research grant to produce a multi-volume edition of Robert Burns’s work, which will be published by Oxford University Press. The project, ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century’, began in 2009, the 250th anniversary of the poet’s birth, and will take at least 15 years to complete."   Read more on the website!

http://burnsc21.glasgow.ac.uk/

Naxos, Digital Theatre Plus, Oxford Music all on Whittaker Library website ...

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RCS

Research

Resources

for 

iPad, laptop, PC or phone

OUR LIBRARY MICRO-RESEARCH PROJECT

We've made such a loud noise about our online subscriptions recently, that most students are well aware that we've got them!
 
... but we are still curious to find out if students prefer any particular term to describe all these databases.

• "Electronic" or "Digital"?
• "Online" or "Database"?
• "Collections" or "Resources"?

So we're doing a one-question survey to see if any particular terminology is more popular.

Would you like to know what the answer is?  Watch this space! We'll have reached a conclusion by the end of this week!

Library Tips for Getting Started On a Research Project

Researchers at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland are generally researching some aspect of the performing arts.  We've compiled a reading list of books that we have in stock about research methodology - some are more general, and others are subject-specific.  You can access the list HERE.

Did you know that If you're one of our registered readers, you can save your own reading lists once you’ve logged in?  This is a way of keeping note of useful material.  Alternatively, you could sign up to Zotero or Mendeley.  But do start keeping a bibliography from the very beginning of your research - there's nothing worse than being unable to trace something that you're sure you read a while ago!

We are the Whittaker Library at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, here to support our performing artists and technicians in their teaching, learning and research.

The Musical Experiences of Blind and Partially-Sighted People (Research Project)

If you're a visually impaired musician, or have any amongst your acquaintance, please take a moment to read about this new research project.

"The Visually-impaired musicians' lives project provides an investigation into the musical practices, participation and learning experiences of blind and partially-sighted people. It is a research project based at the Institute of Education, University of London, in partnership with the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) and the Royal Academy of Music funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Further information can be found on the project website at http://vimusicians.ioe.ac.u

"The project is still running a survey for all types of visually-impaired musicians, including instrumentalists, singers, composers, music teachers and others; whether top professionals, amateurs or beginners. If you have any contacts or know anyone with contacts to visually-impaired musicians you’d be very welcome to forward information about the project and the survey to them.
"The online version of the survey can be accessed at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RJHBGNH

or via the link on our project homepage.  It is also possible to arrange to complete the survey via telephone or Skype.

Please contact the principal investigator of the project, David Baker, for further details.

Contact details:

Dr David Baker,
"Visually-impaired musicians' lives" project,
Institute of Education, University of London,
20 Bedford Way,
London WC1H 0AL.

Tel: 01753 524740.

E-mail: David.Baker@ioe.ac.uk

Bass Culture in Scottish Musical Traditions

We have a blog for our AHRC-funded research project!

http://bassculture.info/

 

 

 

Research into Scottish fiddle-tune accompaniments

© Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk.

This seems an appropriate image to illustrate the Bass Culture research project I'm assisting with.  (It is part of a bigger picture by David Allan, called A Highland Wedding at Blair Atholl.)

 What I and my colleagues at the Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge are seeking to establish, is what the cellist was playing, what patterns we can identify, and how it changed during the 18th-early 19th centuries.  Here's our brand-new blog, including a fab picture of the research team.

And here's another nice one called The Penny Wedding, by Sir David Wilkie.  His preliminary sketch shows the musicians more clearly.

http://www.artexpertswebsite.com/pages/artists/artists_l-z/wilkie/Wilkie_ThePennyWedding.jpg