Your research proposal should include the following sections:
• Title
• Short description of the research (approximately 100–200 words)
This includes the general background of your proposed research, your research question, and its specific objectives. You should explain in broad terms the nature of the issues in which you are interested, with perhaps the reason for this interest.
• Positioning of the research (approximately 1500–2000 words)
This should reference the most important and most recent work related to the research (i.e., a brief review of relevant literature), demonstrate your understanding of the research issues, and identify existing gaps in the literature (both theoretical and practical) that your research is intended to address. You should provide a summary of the academic debate surrounding your research topic with some reference to the more important papers and books in this area. Of course, this is not expected to be comprehensive, but search engines readily enable the important contributors in any area to be identified.
• Expected findings or contributions (approximately 300–400 words)
This section should describe the expected findings logically deducted from the previous two sections. In some disciplines, this section may not be appropriate.
• Research methods (approximately 600–900 words)
This section should identify the information that is necessary to conduct the research, such as possible research designs or data analysis techniques that could generate the information.
• List of references (not included in the word count)
You will need to include both academic references (i.e., refereed journal articles) as well as books, industry reports, etc. Please bear in mind that although you will need to ensure that all areas discussed above are covered in your research proposal, the content will be unique to your area of research. For this reason we are unable to provide examples of successful proposals.