A Template for Scholarly Project Proposals & Other OSE Research Proposals

This template is used for:

Use a different template for:

Deadlines & Instructions

Formatting

  • Single-spaced
  • 1-inch margins
  • Approximately 4-5 pages in length, not including references
  • Insert page numbers
  • Do not skip any sections below
  • Use track changes if you are revising or updating your proposal
  • Save file name as: lastname.shortproposaltitle.date

Sections

Feel free to copy and paste the sections below into a word document to write your proposal.

Introduction:

Student Name and Email:
Mentor Name and Email:
Date:
Proposal Title:
Proposal Status: New or Revised (use track changes if you are revising your proposal)
Project start date: (day, month, year)
Is your IRB approval through your mentor’s institution? Yes or No. If Yes, add in the IRB approval number in section four. If No, seek advice from the Longwood Office of Regulatory Affairs and Research Compliance (ORARC).

Specific Aims: What is the question you want to answer? (½ page)
  • Brief orientation: 1 paragraph that leads to the hypothesis/question and specific aims
  • Hypothesis (if applicable)
  • Specific aims
  • Goals of project and the potential contribution to the field
  • More info about Specific Aims
Significance: Why should anyone care about this problem? (½ page)
Innovation: What is novel about this project? (½ page)
  • Has this been done before?
  • How is this different from previous work?
  • How will this project contribute to and/or advance the field?
  • More info about Innovation
Approach: How will the aims be accomplished? (1½ pages)
  • Methods
  • Biostatistical Methods: Include a formal sample size estimate to document that the sample size you chose is sufficient to detect clinically meaningful effects with adequate power. If your sample size is fixed, a power calculation is required to document your power to detect meaningful effects. These calculations are required for all proposed studies that involve animals and humans, as they are integral to the rigor of the proposed work. More info about sample size and power calculations.
  • Data analysis, including primary and secondary outcomes or associations
  • IRB/Ethical Considerations
  • Limitations: What are the potential limitations of your approach? How will you minimize these limitations? (Note: limitations are inherent to your methods and are generally predictable.)
Student Role: What is your specific role? What are you going to do? (< ½ page)
Feasibility: Can the work be done as proposed? (1-2 pages)
  1. Mentor: Why is this person the right mentor for the project? What is their experience in this area?
  2. Environment: Where is the work being done? Is this project part of a larger project? Is the work being done in collaboration with someone else?
  3. Resources: Are all the resources (e.g. IT, statistician) that are needed available?
  4. Obstacles and Challenges: What do you anticipate might prevent the work from being completed as proposed? How will you deal with these obstacles and challenges? (Note: obstacles and challenges are potential operational and organizational problems.)
  5. Language requirement: Will your study be conducted in English? If not, do you speak the language in question? How will you address/overcome language barriers?
  6. Timeline: Should be feasible. Note whether you will work on this project full-time and/or part-time.
For Global Health Applications:
  • What is your Plan B? What will you do if you can’t carry out your proposed project as planned in-country? Please provide at least two paragraphs.
  • What are the political, social, cultural, language, logistical, and personal safety issues that may affect the successful implementation of your proposed project and how will you deal with them?
  • Elaborate on ethical issues that may arise and how you will address them.

Detailed Guidance for Specific Sections

Below is additional guidance on certain sections of your proposal.

Specific Aims

The Specific Aims are the most important section of your proposal. Provide a concise statement of the goals of the specific scholarship proposed, the expected outcome, and the impact of the scholarship. Specific Aims should state what you are going to do.

General Structure
  1. A preamble that introduces the topic and builds to the actual specific aims
  2. Actual specific aims: a succinct list of the specific objectives of the proposed scholarship
  3. Significance and future directions statement: 2 or 3 sentences

Most good student proposals have two actual specific aims, though some may have one and others may have three.

The Specific Aims should not be written as an “introduction.” This is a common mistake.

Specific Aims are a precis. Specific Aims should include aspects of Significance, Innovation, Approach, and Feasibility and should stand alone. A reviewer who reads your Specific Aims should have a pretty good sense of what you are proposing to do. Anything mentioned in the Specific Aims should be repeated and expanded in the appropriate sections even though it may feel redundant.

If you have questions within your proposal that cannot be answered before you start your project, that is, if there is some necessary step you need to take before proceeding, make that step part of your proposal here. For example, it may be reasonable to include a literature review or materials development as part of your project, but keep in mind that your proposal still needs to be significant and innovative.

Significance

Significance addresses what is important about your proposal and your specific aims, not the larger topic.

Common errors in writing this section are:

  1. Including too much background information
    1. Background Information puts your proposal in context, so a little background may deserve mentioning (1-2 sentences) to support the significance of your proposal
    2. There’s no need to teach the reader about your topic or prove that you are a subject matter expert
  2. Focusing on the significance of the topic, rather than the significance of your proposal and your specific aims
    1. Your proposal is not about what others have found, but about what you are planning to do
Innovation

Innovation addresses what is novel about your proposed work. You can do something important (significant), but you should also strive to do something that is new.

  • Do you have a new method?
  • Are you generating new knowledge?
  • Are you using a new data source?
  • Is this an entirely new area?
Approach

Sample size & power calculation:

You likely learned about power and sample size in the Essentials I or II course. The Approach should include a sample size and/or power calculation. Even if you cannot or should not have a power or sample size calculation in your proposal, you need to state that explicitly.

Power and sample size address whether your Approach is likely to achieve a meaningful answer (either positive or negative). State what statistical methods you will use.

As a first pass, it is usually sufficient for your power calculation to be a comparison of two proportions or two normally distributed means. To do a power calculation, you must be clear about your primary outcome. If your primary outcome at first does not seem to be two proportions or two means, you may be able to simplify it into that format. For example, if you have a time-to-event outcome, pick some arbitrary time and dichotomize the outcome into two proportions. If you have a 5-point scale, dichotomize it into two proportions.

There are many online power calculators. Consider having a statistician involved in your actual project, either as an identified collaborator or through the Catalyst consult service.

In deciding about your power calculation/sample size statement you might try to come to one of the three following conclusions (though there are many other possibilities):

  1. You do not need a sample size or power calculation because:
    1. You are doing pilot work
    2. You are doing a kind of scholarship for which a calculation is not applicable (e.g., reporting, ethnography, qualitative work, other humanities, and fields of cell and molecular biology where power calculations are not customary).
  2. You have a limited sample size (because of the number of subjects available or resource constraints) and need to figure out how much power you will have to detect a clinically meaningful difference:
    1. For dichotomous variables, use the chi-squared test
    2. For continuous (approximately normally distributed) variables, use the t test
    3. For a single outcome, given your sample size, you need to say how precise you will be in your final estimate (e.g. with a 95% confidence interval).
  3. To achieve pre-specified power (usually 80% or 90%) to detect a clinically meaningful difference, you need a certain sample size:
    1. For dichotomous variables and two groups, use the chi-squared tes
    2. For continuous variables and two groups, use the t test
    3. For a single outcome, you will need to say how big your sample size should be to achieve precision in your final estimate.
Limitations

For purposes of your proposal, limitations are inherent to the approach you select and are unavoidable, but they are also foreseeable. Limitations are present even if everything in your proposal goes perfectly.

Student Role

Be specific about what you are going to do. The purpose of this section is to clearly explain to reviewers how much of your project you will be doing yourself and how much will be done by other members of your team. You should write this section in the first person, active voice (1/2 page).

Feasibility

Obstacles and challenges are common and are potential operational and organizational problems.