A research proposal is a detailed document designed to persuade reviewers that your planned research project is worth investing in (through approval/funding) and pursuing. This is done before any experimentation and thus does not include any analysis or discussion of results.

Your proposal should contain information on what you’re investigating, how you will build up on existing solutions, and that your approach is the most conventional one.

Showing these clearly and precisely will turn your proposal into a worthwhile document.

The timeline of the main documents can look something like this: Research Proposal → Research Plan → Research Paper

Most research proposals follow the structure of an…

• Introduction
• Problem Statement
• Objectives
• Hypotheses
• Procedure
• Bibliography

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A research proposal is typically a formal outline of your project. A research paper’s foundational introduction, methodology and literature review is typically pulled from the originally drafted research proposal.

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Introduction

The introduction is where you build the case for your project. By the end of it, the reader should understand what the problem is, why it matters, and what you plan to do about it.

Start with the background of your specific issue (literature review), explain the subject area, and introduce whatever organism, system, or technology your research is about.

• In your entire proposal, you should provide citations for every source or reference to another person’s work. (More details on this can be found in Papers & Publishing)
• Write your introduction comprehensively, as if the people reading it are not fully knowledgeable about the topic beforehand.