Masters and Ph.D. students have a lot of questions, confusion, and fear when they are submitting their thesis proposal. Hence, I thought to write/gather a few instructions and request other professors to add their valuable comments.
Professors from different majors may please specify important points or changes in their discipline in the comments.
Although it depends on the requirement of your University, there are still a few points you can be careful about.
Hi Mattiullah,
You can also refer to the following RG links:
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Which_is_the_best_way_to_write_a_research_proposal_Before_writing_a_proposal_what_step_should_be_follow_exactly
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Books_for_thesis_writing_or_proposal_writing
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Shall_I_start_my_thesis_proposal_with_simple_structure_first_or_with_directly_Thesis_writing_structure
I work in the department of Business Administration, and my major is Human Resource Management so some of my comments might not be suitable for other disciplines.
You can check the following things before submitting your proposal.
1. Is your document readable (for non-native English Writers)? Make sure that you have a clear, understandable statement (you may not write very lengthy sentences making it difficult to understand). If you have grammatical mistakes, you can check the free or paid version of software like Grammarly or others. Give your documents to your friends to read and ask them questions to see what they did not understand.
2. Write very clear introduction, define your terms and purpose. Explain the benefits of your research. Write on practical implications. You can think like, “what is the loss in the world if you do not carry this research?”, “why your research is important and for whom?”, “Why the research should be done by you (a Master or a Ph.D. scholar)?”.
3. Include latest references in your introduction especially your start and those papers better be from reputed or simply from impact factor journals. Most of the important papers referred in your document especially those on which you research and claims are based better be said by reputed researchers of the field and impact factor Journals. For new research students, it may be easier just to check the journal listed in Scopus at https://www.scopus.com/sources.uri?DGCID=Scopus_blog_post_check2015
4. Do not write an old reference in writing your research Gap. For example, for “Williams (2002) emphasized to work on the topic because of ….”, you need to explain why it is still important to work on the topic in 2017 or your reference or base may quite possibly be senseless. Similarly, there should better be more reasons for doing your research.
5. When you have done writing, you may check the latest papers are very visible in your proposal.
6. Understand the research philosophies; Be clear and be able to justify your sampling technique; Data collection process should look applicable and realistic. If you are using a scale, prefer those that are realistic and justifiable to your research and prefer the scales published in reputed journals and given by reputed authors in your field.
Make sure that the work has not been undertaken by any researcher in recent past and title should be correctly proposed. In many universities it is very difficult to even make minor changes in the title after official approval.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Linguistics
- Composition Studies
- Writing