Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Sebastian Schuck & others How to structure a research proposal The aim of a proposal is to convince your readers that your planned research is worth doing. Here are a few pointers to help you structure your proposal. A proposal needs to (1) define a scientific question; (2) explain why this question is significant; (3) elaborate strategies to address this question; and (4) stay within the length and format specified. Typically, a proposal consists of the following sections: title, abstract, introduction, experimental design, and references. Sometimes, a section called ‘outlook’ or ‘perspectives’ is inserted after the experimental design section. In our case you have 4000 words excluding references. Including Figures can often be helpful. The introduction serves to give a concise summary of your area of research, outline what is not yet known, define your question and explain its significance. Whether you find some topic interesting is not the point – you need to demonstrate that answering your question will advance our understanding of nature, plausibly lead to tangible health benefits, or both. Besides identifying a question you should try to develop at least one hypothesis concerning what the answer to your question could look like. An experimentally testable hypothesis is a proposal’s ideal conceptual compass. State your hypothesis at the end of the introduction or the beginning of the experimental design section. Remember, in your experiments you are testing your hypothesis, not "trying to prove" it. You could also present two alternative hypotheses. In the experimental design section you describe what you want to do. This often involves dividing your research plan into steps, each of which constitutes a milestone called a specific aim. Say, for example, your question is how a certain disease-linked point mutation in a human mitochondrial protein affects the protein’s function. Your specific aims could be to (1) determine the subcellular localization of the wild-type and mutant protein in tissue culture cells, (2) test whether knockdown of the protein impairs mitochondrial function and whether this phenotype can be rescued by the mutant version, and (3) determine the crystal structure of the wildtype and the mutant protein. You need to describe how you want to do these experiments, explain that they are feasible, discuss the outcomes you envision and, if possible, outline alternative approaches in case something does not work. The description of the experiments usually explains only the principles of the assays involved. Feasibility comprises three aspects - that the experiments are do-able in general, that they are do-able with the expertise available in your particular lab (e.g. if non-standard techniques are involved) and that they are do-able within a relevant time frame, which in this case is that of a Master’s thesis (6 months). It is helpful to include an approximate time-plan: this tells the reader whether you are able to estimate the time needed realistically. For example, you probably would not manage to complete point (3) in the list above if you had only 6 months, although you might manage to get enough protein to do crystallization. Thus point (3) could go into the "Outlook" section. The discussion of possible results is inevitably somewhat speculative but allows you to show that you have given real thought to what you might find and what these findings could mean. You should spell out what positive and negative results mean and what you will do in each case. (For example, if you knock expression of a protein down by RNAi and see no effect, it might mean that the protein is not essential - but it might also mean that the RNAi didn't work well enough, so there was still enough protein left for the function. What can you do instead?) Your experimental plan should be designed such that it consists of complementing parts. In our example, a problematic set of aims would be to (1) generate a knockout mouse of your gene of interest and evaluate the associated phenotypes, (2) reexpress the mutant version to determine whether these phenotypes can be rescued, and (3) if the mutant cannot rescue the phenotype, do a drug screen to cure the mouse expressing the mutant protein. This project would completely depend on obtaining a viable knockout mouse with a phenotype in the first place, and each subsequent aim depends on the success of the preceding one. In contrast, a good research plan should be likely to generate new insights even if any one part fails. (Of course, for an MSc thesis project, getting a knockout mouse would be completely unrealistic anyway - but a project that 100% depended on getting some particular cell line would be just as problematic.) At the end of your proposal, for instance as part of an outlook section, it is a good idea to again put your planned work into a broader context. If, for example, you are going to work with a model organism such as yeast or flies, you need to spell out whether this is likely to be of relevance to other organisms. Context matters here. For example, if you were looking for a target for an insecticide, you would actively want results from insects not to apply to mammalian cells. But if you were working on stem cells, you would be interested to know whether the same phenomenon occurs in mammals. Thus, your proposal should start out broad, then focus on your specific research question, and finally zoom out again. Finally, remember to stay within the rules of good scientific practice. Copying whole sentences is not allowed. It is usually also really obvious to a trained reader, like your examiner. If you include a copied Figure, say clearly where it came from in the legend - if you changed it a bit, write "adapted from". If you cite a paper you must read it (or at least the relevant parts of it) in order to check that what you claim that paper says actually is in the paper. Never rely only on reviews.