Guidelines on drafting a research proposal for an application for postgraduate study

1. What is already known about this topic? What are the key works and who are the prominent scholars in the field? 
    
2. What are the issues involving this topic which generate discussion and disagreement and warrant further investigation? Why are those issues important? 
    
3. Which of these issues do you propose to investigate and why? And what impact do you expect your final work to have on the field? 
    
4. What methodology will you use to answer this question? 
    
5. To what extent will your research involve previously unexamined primary sources, ‘new’ analyses of existing source materials or some combination of both?
    
6. To what extent are you confident that these sources include relevant, usable material?
    
7. What potential problems do you anticipate in the research, and how do you plan to overcome these?

(Partially based on guidelines produced by IMES, University of Edinburgh, from chapter three of Writing the Successful Thesis: Entering the Conversation, by Irene L.Clark, Prentice Hall, PTR, 2006.)