Some advice on how to structure a research proposal

[Revised version 3]

Luciano Floridi1,2
1
Digital Ethics Center, Yale University, 85 Trumbull St., New Haven, CT 06511, USA
2
Department of Legal Studies, University of Bologna, Via Zamboni 27/29, 40126
Bologna, Italy
Email for correspondence: luciano.floridi@yale.edu

Abstract
Applicants are often uncertain about how to structure their research proposal. There
is no unique recipe, and different people or institutions may expect specific documents,
provide forms, or offer suggestions that only resemble what I recommend below. This
is even more so when dealing with multi- or inter-disciplinary areas of research.
However, personal experience and interactions with many colleagues in various
departments and universities have taught me that the structure presented in this paper
helps to meet the formal expectations of most committees evaluating a project. This
short introduction provides a synthesis. I hope it is helpful. I shall try to keep it
updated.

Keywords
Gantt, hypothesis, keyhole model, question, research proposal.
Executive Summary
Your project should address the following 7 points (or 8 if you are part-time). If you
understand them, and if you are already using them, you can stop reading the following
sections:
1) What’s the specific question addressed by the research?
a. Why is it important? Or, if you prefer, why does it matter to address
it?
2) What’s the (working hypothesis about the) specific answer?
a. How do you support or justify it?
b. What are the objections or criticisms that can be raised and yet
overcome?
3) What’s the methodology?
4) What’s the timeline?
5) Why you?
6) Why this institution/supervisor/research group?
7) Have you considered funding and other resources needed by the project?
8) How are you going to balance your commitments?
Let’s see them in detail.

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1. The research question and the keyhole analogy
Research is a matter of expanding human knowledge beyond its current boundaries.
A simple test to know whether you are doing research is to think that the outcome will
be read by the experts in the field who will learn something they did not know. In
other words, you are writing to educate the people listed in your project’s references.
Your research may be a small step or a gigantic leap, Armstrong docet,1 but it
must be into the unknown, like an explorer, who leaves behind what has already been
mapped. Andre Gide’s often misquoted phrase comes to mind: “one doesn’t discover
new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time”.2 If you
have not lost sight of the known, you are not yet researching, you are still learning.
You must have the courage to get lost, so to speak. A daring version of the sapere aude,
as Kant would say.3 The supervisor is there to ensure that you can return to the shore
and get lost only temporarily, not permanently, and hence safely. Or, with a different
analogy, the supervisor should be your Ariadne: make sure they offer the right thread.
The exploring metaphor also helps to explain why some research is more
difficult than others: not all boundaries are the same. If you wish to do research in a
deeply explored field, reaching the limit of what is already known may require years of
learning. The journey through the known land may be a matter of quantity. In the
Humanities, for example, it is often the case that you will have to read a library full of
articles and books before getting to the point where the unknown is finally visible. Try
doing research about Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The book has been studied,
discussed, analysed, and interpreted for millennia. Google Scholar alone lists almost
90,000 documents about it. And that does not include books. It will take a while before
you see the shore and finally sail. And the journey may be a matter of quality. Sticking
to the same example, the book is in Greek, and it goes without saying that your
research must be based on the original text. So, you need to have some grasp of ancient
Greek. This is also true in mathematical sciences, of course. Relevant technical

1 https://time.com/5621999/neil-armstrong-quote/
2 Eng. Tr. Internet Archive 1927, original (Gide 1925). This is the full passage “I have often
thought,” interrupted Edouard, “that in art, and particularly in literature, the only people who
count are those who launch out on to unknown seas. One doesn’t discover new lands without
consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. But our writers are afraid of the
open; they are mere coasters.”.
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Enlightenment%3F

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languages of all kinds must be learnt and mastered. The literature and the technical
aspects keep growing. At the same time, if you do research in a new field, you are
looking at qualitative rather than quantitative challenges. The literature is small;
knowing everything that has been published on the topic may be a matter of many
months, not years of learning. So, some cost-benefit analysis is essential, before
embarking on a long journey that may be less than fruitful.
Back to the topic, if you read about it in The Economist, for example, it may be
interesting, but it is not yet research. Having an interest in a popular, fashionable, or
thought-provoking subject is not yet having a clear sense of what your valuable
research may be. You must have an interesting question to address, and one which has
not yet been answered, or at least not in the way you plan to answer it. I write
“question” here, and not “problem” because, in the end, the problem will have to be
translated into an actual linguistic question, but it does not matter very much.
Your question must be specific. It cannot be, for example, “what is knowledge?”,
because this is a direction of travelling, not a research question. But it could be “is
justified true belief knowledge?” (spoiler for the non-philosophers: no (Gettier 1963)).
To be a good, research question, it must have at least two properties that are usually
inversely related. It must be both interesting and answerable (IA for short). Unfortunately,
the more interesting a question is – it would be amazing to answer it – the less likely it
is that it can be answered in the short space of a paper, or in the time allowed to
complete a Master or even a PhD thesis. But the more answerable it is, the less
interesting it becomes. One of the difficult things to learn, and that is learnt only
through experience, is to identify the valuable questions that have the best trade-off
between being interesting and being answerable. The usual suggestion students get is
to err on the safe side and privilege feasibility, that is, answerability. You hear this very
often: the topic is too wide, big, ambitious, extended... You need to focus, restrict,
concentrate… The people offering this advice have your future in mind: they care
much more about you finishing the project than advancing human knowledge. It is
their responsibility to ensure that you can complete your project in time, usually a
necessary condition for a degree. They are not wrong. But they may be frustrating.
Because the recommendation regularly translates into choosing a small, irrelevant topic
of no interest, which can be researched more easily and successfully, but about which

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nobody cares. “Doable and never done before” is not a sign of novelty but irrelevance.
You should try to resist such well-meant advice. It is a great suggestion to complete a
thesis and obtain a degree. Especially because a thesis is a hybrid artefact that must do
two things simultaneously: show that you know (certification) and show something
that experts do not know (innovation). But research, the valuable kind, pushes the
limits of what we know. It is intrinsically risky, for some questions may turn out to be
uninteresting or unanswerable, or even both. So, either you are suggested a research
question that the supervisor (in this case also known as principal investigator) has
already formulated and knows it is IA – this happens in large research groups where
PhD projects are part of more extensive research programs, for example. Or, as I invite
you to do, you can think carefully and with progressive refinements4 – questions start
vague and broad and become increasingly sharper and specific – about what you wish
to spend your best intellectual energies researching. Do not merely privilege the
feasibility of the project. To do so, the following analogy may help.
Imagine that your research question is like a keyhole. The narrow and clearcut
nature of the hole is the specific nature of the question that makes it answerable. The
fantastic, new view that the experts can enjoy looking through the hole is the interesting
nature of the question you are going to address. The right keyhole shows a remarkable
scenario. It is not the keyhole of a tiny box, or a dark closet, but one that provides a
fascinating view. Less metaphorically, the question and the answer are rich in
important consequences. If your keyhole is truly exceptional, you may write a paper
like “On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of
Light”5 (Einstein 1905), or “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the
Market Mechanism” (Akerlof 1970) and be awarded a Nobel for it.

2. The Answer
A good question comes with some ideas about how to answer it. This is tricky because,
of course, you still have to do the research, so you do not know what the answer is.
It’s the usual chicken-and-egg issue. But you must have some sense of where to look

4 I borrow the expression and the general idea from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refinement_(computing)
5 https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol2-trans/100

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for one. Or maybe a hunch about what ideas you wish to test, try, or explore first. Or
perhaps you know about some previous work that could be a good starting point. In
other words, you must have some working hypothesis. It does not matter if the working
hypothesis turns out to be wrong. Of course, it would be preferable if it didn’t, but
being wrong is part of the research. And being able to formulate a clear, relevant, and
convincing working hypothesis, and later be able to try it and learn from its failure or
partial success to develop a better one, is part of the process. It takes time to learn how
to do good research; it is an art, not an algorithm, and sometimes it is worse than two
steps forward and one back; sometimes, you have to change direction completely. But
having no idea to begin with, no sense of what may or may not work in principle, or
being completely in the dark with respect to the first attempts one could make is a bad
sign of the immaturity of the research project as a whole. Going back to Gide’s quote,
you must decide to sail in some direction and be able to explain why that direction is
preferable. Sometimes the difficulty in developing a research is not so much to identify
the plausible answer, but how to get from the question to (checking) the answer.

3. The Methodology
Here, I have only three bits of advice.

3.1. There is a methodology, but mind the feasibility trap.

Whatever the methodology (see below), do not fall into the “feasibility trap”, as I like
to call it. Sometimes, researchers fall in love with a tool, a method, or the possibility
of elaborating information in a specific way. It could be a fancy way of visualising data,
the availability of a database that can be interrogated, a statistical analysis, an easy
solution to scrape data from websites, maybe the availability of some social media data
one can manipulate statistically, or an AI-driven (e.g. through a LLM) analysis … the
trap is to start from the method and decide which question to address based on the
method one likes. But remember: the methodology always follows the research
question, never the other way round (well, there is one exception: if you are a
methodology researcher, i.e., a researcher whose questions concern how to develop or
improve specific methods, e.g. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna won
the chemistry Nobel for the development of a powerful way to change DNA). Back

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to Einstein, when working on the General Theory of Relativity, he ended up using
Riemannian geometry (a non-Euclidean geometry) and tensor calculus (a kind of
calculus used to describe complex motion in uneven space):6 the questions came first,
the methods to answer them followed. In short, there is no right or wrong
methodology, only one adequate to address the research question.

6 Do not miss this beautiful and very intutive description here:

https://steemit.com/math/@haig/the-math-of-general-relativity-albert-einstein-s-trouble-with-
tensor-calculus

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3.2. Qualitative vs. quantitative methodology, be clear.
In some disciplines, and especially in the broad field of social sciences, there are
quantitative (e.g. statistical) and qualitative (e.g. ethnographic or interview-based)
methods to develop your research. Make sure you clarify whether your research will
use quantitative or qualitative methods, why the methods chosen are adequate, and
whether they are feasible. For example, interviews and questionnaires are qualitative
methods that require much attention (think of biased questions, for example). And like
collecting and analysing data, they may not be feasible. People may not be available,
data may be secret, expensive to obtain, or proprietary. A final note of warning: you
may be told that both qualitative and quantitative methods are equally acceptable, but
the truth is that people are always impressed by some graph. Resist the temptation
(recall: the methodology follows the question), but if there is a chance to add some
numbers, without overdoing it, it may be a good idea.

3.3. There is no methodology, but do not confess it.

Sometimes, there is no methodology, but make sure that this confession does not harm
your project. If they ask for one, give them one. The problem often arises in the
Humanities, especially when people try to be “scientific”. Researchers may struggle to
specify a methodology because there is usually none, or at least not one as there is for
a neuroscience experiment, for example. Philosophers can be equally challenged (there
are exceptions, of course, such as when you can specify that you will translate some
Greek texts into English, or use a specific modal logic to do your work, etc.). Please
remember that you will likely be penalised for telling the truth, indicating that you will
use the RTW approach (read, think, and write), repeating the process in different order
until you get the question clear and the answer satisfactory. The RTW methodology is
better kept to yourself. Instead, there are some formulaic solutions; ask Google or
ChatGPT for your discipline-appropriate ones. These are some examples.
a) You are not going to read; you are going to engage in a literature review of a specific
kind (systematic, etc.), or develop some topic-specific, desk research.
b) You are not going to think; you are going to elaborate a conceptual analysis, or an
ethical impact assessment.
c) And you are not going to write; you are going to structure the analysis.

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In other words, you need to find a way of satisfying the bureaucratic mind that will
read your project and want to see the box indicating “Methodology” adequately filled
by the correct number of characters.

4. The Timeline
If you know the steps your research process will require (often called milestones), be
clear about them and as informative as possible. If you do not, make a reasonable
guess. If you cannot, invent it. In any case, always show reasonable confidence, and
sufficient granularity. For example, if the project takes a full academic year, structure
it according to the local calendar (3 terms in Oxford, 2 semesters in Yale, etc.) and
then indicate what will happen in each term or semester, with a starting and ending
time. Always add a Gannt chart;7 it will be welcomed by those who expect it and
impress those with no idea what it is.

5. Why You
This may seem strange, but it is essential to clarify why you are the right researcher to
develop the proposal once you realise that the first 4 points may be addressed perfectly,
but by the wrong profile. Here is a real example. Years ago, I spoke with a student who
wished to develop a very interesting and feasible project about Russian online
propaganda and how it influenced Russian public opinion. I won’t bother you with
further details. Let’s just say that I thought it was a great research proposal. After a
long conversation about many aspects and implications of the research to be
developed, it finally occurred to me to ask the student how good their Russian was
(mind, not whether they had any, logical assumptions can be the worst Achille's heel).
The answer was baffling: they did not speak Russian at all. Nothing. Not even “good
morning”. Clearly, the researcher’s profile was not adequate. They could not even
check the translation of any original source. The example indicates that there is usually
some link and coherence between the researcher’s CV and the research proposed. If
there is not, do not despair, but make sure you acquire the right expertise before
submitting the proposal.

7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart

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6. Why This Institution
This is a question that I was asked many times, especially when applying for jobs. I
thought it was silly. The true answer seemed embarrassingly obvious: I need this
position, and this is a great place. I was wrong. Because this is not an absolute but a
relative question: compared to other places, why is this a better fit? Put this way, it
makes a lot of sense. For example, why Yale (or Oxford), and not Harvard (or
Cambridge)? Ask it this way, and you will see that you have to refer to what makes the
institution, to which you are submitting the research proposal, unique. Maybe it is
because of the local research strength (e.g. an innovative PhD program), a person or
research group you wish to work with, or some special research resources (e.g. an
archive, a supercomputer, a particle accelerator…), whatever the reasons, better be
clear and mention them.

7. What Resources
This is not always essential, but some research proposals require resources (from a
scholarship to develop the project, to access to data or computational power) that
should be clearly identified. Just show that you know what you need and have thought
about potential ways of obtaining it, e.g. sources of funding to which you plan to apply
if the proposal is approved.

8. Time Management
This applies only to part-time researchers who have other commitments. Given your
busy life, explaining how you will develop the research is essential. You better be
honest, clear, and convincing. They will ask anyway.

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9. Conclusion
This is it. If you wish to know more about the value of research and how one may
begin and enjoy a life dedicated to it, there are many valuable texts, among which I
would recommend the following three. They left a deep impression on the younger
me. I hope you will enjoy them:
The Vocation of the Scholar, Johann Gottlieb Fichte 1806 (Fichte 1988)
Advice for a Young Investigator, Santiago Ramón y Cajal 1897 (Ramón y Cajal 1999)
Science as a Vocation, Max Weber 1917 (Weber 2004)

Good luck with your proposal!

References
Akerlof, George A. 1970. “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the
Market Mechanism”. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 84 (3):488-500.
Einstein, A. 1905. “Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes
betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt”. Annalen der Physik 322 (6):132-148.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. 1988. The purpose of higher education also known as the Vocation of
the scholar. Mt. Savage, Md.: Nightsun Books.
Gettier, Edmund L. 1963. “Is justified true belief knowledge?”. Analysis 23 (6):121-
123.
Gide, André. 1925. Les faux-monnayeurs: roman. Paris: Editions de la Nouvelle Revue
Française.
Ramón y Cajal, Santiago. 1999. Advice for a young investigator. Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press.
Weber, Max. 2004. The vocation lectures. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub.

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