Research Proposal Template

Write a clear, well-organised research proposal. The pack includes full Word templates for a thesis or dissertation proposal, a short student research proposal and a grant-style proposal, plus an Excel timeline and budget and a literature matrix to organise your reading.

What a research proposal must do

A research proposal persuades a supervisor, committee or funder that your question is worth asking, that you know the existing research, and that your plan can realistically answer the question with the time and resources you have. Whatever the discipline, readers look for the same things: a focused question, a justified gap, a method that fits the question, awareness of limitations and ethics, and a feasible timeline. The templates are organised around those expectations.

What is included

• Thesis / dissertation proposal (Word) — title page, abstract, introduction, research questions, literature review, methodology, ethics, timeline, references and appendices.
• Short student research proposal (Word) — a 2–4 page version for undergraduate projects, capstones and course assignments.
• Grant-style proposal (Word) — specific aims, significance, innovation, approach, expected outcomes, budget justification and dissemination.
• Research timeline workbook (Excel) — tasks by month with a Gantt-style grid.
• Research budget workbook (Excel) — personnel, equipment, travel and participant costs with totals.
• Literature review matrix (Excel) — organise sources by author, method, findings and relevance.
• Proposal checklist — a final self-review before submission.

The standard proposal structure

Always check your department or funder's own guidelines: many specify headings, word limits and formatting that override general templates.

Writing a strong research question

• Make it specific: name the population, variables or texts and the setting.
• Make it researchable with the data and methods you can realistically access.
• Avoid yes/no questions unless testing a hypothesis; ask “how”, “to what extent” or “what factors”.
• Check that answering it would add something the literature does not already say.
• Keep the scope achievable in the time available — a narrower question answered well beats a broad one answered vaguely.

Using the timeline and budget workbooks

The timeline workbook lists tasks — ethics approval, literature review, data collection, analysis, writing, revisions — against months, and shades the months each task runs, producing a simple Gantt chart you can paste into the proposal. The budget workbook groups costs into categories with quantities and unit costs and totals them, with a column for justification text that many funders require. Both use ordinary formulas, so they work in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice.

Who it is for

Undergraduate and master's students writing a project or thesis proposal, doctoral candidates preparing for a proposal defence, early-career researchers drafting internal or small grant applications, and professionals proposing research within their organisations. The templates are discipline-neutral, with prompts that work for qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods research.

Formats

Proposals and the checklist are editable DOCX files with PDF previews; the timeline, budget and literature matrix are XLSX workbooks. Heading styles are built in so you can generate a table of contents automatically in Word.

Common reasons proposals are sent back

Supervisors and reviewers often return proposals for the same reasons: the question is too broad for the time available; the literature review summarises sources one by one instead of showing the gap; the methods do not match the question (for example, a survey proposed to explain processes better studied through interviews); ethical risks are not addressed; or the timeline leaves too little time for analysis and writing. The checklist in the pack targets each of these so you can fix them before submission.