For many, the first taste of academic research is the preparation for a Bachelor or Masters’ degree dissertation project. However, the success or otherwise of a dissertation often depends upon the care and effort invested in the research proposal. A strong research proposal is also an essential prerequisite acceptance onto a PhD programme.
For a Bachelor’s or a Masters’ dissertation, a good research proposal should contain the following sections:
- An introduction, identifying and locating the research question, and explaining why it is important. It should identify the key literature related to the research question without going into too much detail. Most importantly, it should explain why the topic is important enough to merit the several months of effort required to produce a dissertation.
- A literature review which should identify and discuss the key literature in more detail than in the introduction, and motivate the research question, both in terms of why it is interesting and important, and in terms of locating it in the existing research. In other words identify the gap in the literature that answering the research question will help to fill. Typically, the research question is formally and explicitly stated towards the end of the literature review, sometimes in the form of a hypothesis.
- A data and methods section. This will also refer to literature on the methods to be used. Specifically, it should identify the proposed data, and explain why this data is the best available to the researcher for answering the research question. It should also explain given the characteristics of the data identified, why it is the best analytical method for that data to answer the research question.
- A planned timetable for conducting the research, identifying key milestones and what will be completed and when. Often this takes the form of a Gantt chart.
Literature Review
The literature review is a key part of the preparation for academic research dissertations because it helps to clarify the research question and set it in the context of prior research that is of sufficient quality to achieve publication in peer reviewed scholarly journals. Peer reviewed journal articles (papers) are completely different from other forms of literature, such as course textbooks, newspapers, trade journals and magazines like the Financial Times, or the Economist. Students who confuse the different literature types and omit scholarly papers from their literature review usually receive disappointing results.
One of the most thought provoking papers I have read recently is authored by Luigi Zingales and is published in the top ranked Journal of Finance. It is titled “Does Finance Benefit Society?” but often, the papers that supervisors expect students to discuss in their literature reviews, comprise 50 or more pages of dense text, technical formulae and tables. Therefore, it is not surprising that many students writing a dissertation for the first time find reading the necessary literature to be hard work, especially if English is not their first language.
So, how do you identify which papers should be central to your literature review, when there are so many of them and they are often so long and so difficult to read? The good news is that while the list of relevant papers may be long, you do not need to read every page of every paper. You will want to read every page of some papers and varying amounts of others.
After identifying potentially relevant papers by typing relevant search terms into Google Scholar or a similar database, the abstracts at the beginning of most papers are a good place to start because they summarise the key findings in 300 words or less.
If you don’t have a subscription to the top academic journals, earlier working versions of published papers, and unpublished working papers, can often be accessed from conference proceedings and online repositories such as the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). Individual researchers usually maintain their own personal research home-page – either on their institutions’ web-site or independently, using facilities like Google Scholar or Research Gate. Sometimes these sites have facilities whereby you can request copies of published work directly from the author’s institution. If you find a really useful paper it is worth checking the author’s homepages to see if they are working on follow-up projects that are not yet published. Google Scholar and proprietary systems available through University libraries also allow you to see who has cited published papers, a valuable function if you want to see what the latest research says about the findings of an important paper published some years ago.
If a paper looks promising after reading the abstract, progress to the introduction and conclusion in the main body of the text. If it still looks interesting, then reading the paper’s own literature review and reference list will help you to identify additional papers that are relevant, while the data and methods section should give you some ideas for your own dissertation methods. If you progress to the formal results and analysis section, pay particular attention to how the tables and figures are formatted. It is likely that your dissertation should follow a similar format. Bear in mind that, good, concise, consistent and logical formatting helps to communicate your findings more clearly. Even if you have the most exciting findings ever, they may as well not exist if you do not take the time and effort needed to communicate them effectively and clearly. It is up to you to convince your reader that your findings really are as good as you think they are.
Students often wonder who will supervise the Masters dissertation, or how to go about finding a PhD supervisor. When approaching potential supervisors, it is a good idea to be familiar with the type of research that they are interested in. The easiest way to find this out, is to find their research home pages and go through the above process with some of the papers they have worked on. Make careful notes of the hypotheses they have tested, the methods they have used and their findings. A good research proposal demonstrates attention to detail as well as an understanding of the wider context in which the research question is set.
Isaac T. Tabner 