Writing a winning research proposal is the first step towards the journey of your research work. If you want to secure a good research scholar position in a reputed University then it is important to write a great research proposal. There comes a time when we are in a hurry to prepare a research proposal for a dissertation for a PhD thesis. This guide will be very helpful in preparing a research proposal within the shortest possible time. If you have great research and typing skills then I guarantee that after going through this guide you will be able to prepare your research proposal within a day.
The first thing that you need to do is to decide on your topic. A topic for research is always based on your subject area and field of interest. you must take it into consideration that the proposal is on a topic that has not been studied earlier. To find such a topic you must identify the gaps from the literature. Here is a simple example, if your subject is marketing and your field of interest is digital marketing then your topic can revolve around digital marketing. The next thing is to shorten down this broad topic. This means that you might be studying the advantages of digital marketing, challenges in digital marketing, etc. The next step is to identify the gap and for that you need to go through a lot of journal papers. Let’s say you checked the literature on digital marketing and identified that there has been no study that understood the challenges faced by the companies at the time of doing digital marketing using Facebook in IT companies in London. This is how you narrow down the scope of your topic and research.
Once your topic is finalized, you then need to think about the structure of your proposal. However, most universities provide a structure that you need to follow while preparing a proposal. But in some cases you have to decide the structure. The elements that are the most important for a research proposal are :
- Executive summary
- Introduction
- Background
- Problem statement
- Aims and objective
- Proposed hypothesis
- Scope of research
- Significance of research
- Proposed outline for dissertation or thesis
- Literature review
- Research methodology
- Timeline for research
This is the most widely used structure for research proposals. Also, please do not forget to add the cover page, table of contents and references. Now, all these points have to be customized as per the research topic and the objectives that you need to achieve through this research.
If your research proposal has all the elements that are mentioned above, and if you have justified all these points then no one can stop you from getting admission in a top-notch university for your research work.
