This experience lead me to reflect on the whole process: what made it so erratic, why would it take longer than expected and why would it be so frustrating? I came up with the following explanations for myself:

1. unspecific guidance: everybody has heard of a “proposal” and you know that it is meant to be written before the actual thesis. But how to even get there? How to start, what to do in the middle? The time from start to proposal can easily cover a year and requires particular activities and techniques – find them out and name them
2. The deliverables are not clearly defined: so you look up some literature, how to structure it? What about these ominous research questions, how do they look like? What is a topic and when do I know that I have found one? At least for me it is very hard to try to reach an unclear goal.
3. Heuristics / strategies / quality gates: How to decide between alternatives? How to judge their feasibility? Again, if you have no clue what to look for, how do you know when you found it?

To find out more about this I went through a number of books and articles and for the most relevant sources I want to share  what I consider most useful about them.

The sources

I have reviewed several books and online articles. Some focussing on academic writing project in general, some focussing on the early stages (up to a research) proposal for computer scientists.

The books

• Booth, W. C.; Colomb, G. G. & Williams, J. M. (2003), The Craft of Research, The University of Chicago Press.
• Davis, G. B. & Parker, C. A. (1997), Writing the doctoral dissertation: a systematic approach, Barrons’ Educational Series, Inc..
• Kruse, O. (1999), Keine Angst vor dem leeren Blatt, Campus Verlag.

and the online articles

• Lauer, H. (1975), ‘Discussion on Ph.D. thesis proposals in computing science’, The Computer Journal 18(3).
• Levine, J. S. (2004),’Writing and Presenting Your Thesis or Dissertation’, eBook, http://www.lulu.com/product/e-book-download/writing-and-presenting-your-thesis-or-dissertation-%28ebook%29/96916. (Also available at: http://www.learnerassociates.net/dissthes/index.htm)

The process of writing a proposal

All sources except Davis and Parker discuss the writing process at least up until the proposal itself. They all more or less assume that there are the following steps

• an orientation phase
• a literature research phase
• a selection or refinement phase
• the write-up of the proposal

Kruse describes the orientation in much detail, he discusses particular questions that any research should ask him/herself when starting a new, big project, how to narrow a subject down, what types of projects there are and much more.  The book looks at all of this from a “writing” point of view, where the act and skill of writing is the vehicle to generate and order thoughts and bring them into a shape that can be used to inform others. Lauer takes the opposite approach and looks at the PhD process as a project and gives appropriate advice on how to manage the different stages.

The literature research phase is presented similarly in all the four sources. The literature review for a proposal is supposed to be comprehensive but not exhaustive (which it needs to be in the thesis itself). Kruse recommends to do a very superficial but broad literature “scan” in the orientation phase (including just reading headlines and abstracts), in order to get a feeling for topics and questions, the amount of potentially relevant material and an idea about who are names to remember in the field.

Deliverables and Gates

Even more important (at least for me) than information about the process were specific and concrete deliverables Ican work towards and “gates” at which I get feedback on how my creations are so far.

One of the most crucial self-assessment seems to be having a concise research question that reflects the current research. Only with a specific question can the available literature and the necessary research work be narrowed down sufficiently to actually get done. Booth, Colomb and Williams offering a short fill-in-the-blanks pattern for this purpose, that basically asks four questions:

• What are you studying? (Topic)
• What do you want to find out? (Question)
• What for? (“Cost of Research”)
• What benefit does it have for the reader? (Practical application)

A beginner’s mistake (count me in) is to stop narrowing down with just a topic. With an actual question, it becomes clear, what your interest in the topic is. This makes it more concise and relevant to you. Unfortunately, you are not researching for yourself, but for a community of researchers. The third part describes what value this research has to them, or conversely, what cost it comes with if it remains unanswered. Finally, especially if you are in applied research, the questions is: what are the implications outside the research community, in every day life.

Once one is a little deeper into any particular question, the “topic analysis” sheet from Davis and Parker might come in handy. They suggest to fill out a questionnaire with six questions, before starting to write the actual proposal. This questionnaire requires you to name a questions, but it also includes a short summary on related work, theories, research approach and possible outcomes. The idea is that you can fill out more than one questionnaire with reasonable effort. If you have more than one topic or several variants on one you can get into them deep enough to know what they are about and so decide which alternative is best, all before you write the actual proposal.

Lauer offers some advice on what should be in the proposal, which goes pretty much along the lines of Davis and Parker. His notion of checking the quality of a proposal leads to idea that this should be a circular or iterative process. He discusses what could go wrong at early versions of a proposal and what is necessary to fix these problems.

Summing it up

Hopefully, this little overview of my small library of research aproach sources has given you some hints as to whether or not this is usefull for you. I am sure there is a ton of different literature, but it appears to me that I am approaching “theoretical saturation“, the point at which reading new books on the same topic tell me almost nothing new. Yet there might be stuff that is better written, more compact or more specialized to one or the other discipline. I would love for you to share in the comments.