A PhD proposal demonstrates that you know where the frontier of (scientific) knowledge is, which questions need to be asked next, and can develop a methodology to design your research to collect evidence to answer a targeted set of those questions.

You need:

  1. To specify your topic if interest
  2. To know the literature(s) related to that topic (mainly academic, but also industry & grey literatures)
  3. To know the limitations of that literature and why further reseach is needed
  4. To be able to explain why that research would be interesting (not incremental, trivial or obvious)
  5. To summarise the crux of your research topic as a research question
  6. To have a methodology or plan to collect evidence towards answering that question
  7. To justify why your choice of methods is the most viable
  8. To contextualise all of the above in consideration of the time and resources available to you
  9. To integrate a ‘pathway to impact’ to implement your findings in a way that creates value for others. That could include development of a startup, including its own evidence base relating to problem-solution fit or product-market fit, summarised as a busienss plan. Or it could include a commercialisation and licensing plan.

I’m guessing the last dot point is the one that’s most familliar to you, and that you have a handicap in the first couple dot points.

Try our brand new ePhD Research Proposal template!

Accessing the literature

Keyword by keyword, pdf by pdf

Paywalls are annoying. https://scholar.google.com/ is one of the fastest and most used tools to identify publications that are relevant to a given search string. If you already have an idea of the academic literature you work is related, to, I highly recommend starting with finding literature review articles.

Especially if they’re relatively recent (e.g. last 3-5 years).

We use Google Scholar all the time, too. In many cases, Google Scholar provides a link to the articles via Open Access or another platform (e.g. a version the author made avaiable via ReseachGate or personal websites). As a minimum, you can read the abstract of any article at the publisher’s site, to get a sense if you need the full version. A quick way to spot influential articles is to look at the number of citations (or citations per year) it has. It takes a little more experience to know which journals are higher quality or to recognise authors who are known for amazing work.

If you still can’t access the pdf online, you still have several options: