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A provisional title

This is the headline for your proposed research and so it should include any key concepts, empirical focus, or lines of inquiry that you aim to pursue.

While your title may change, it is important to devise a title that describes what you aspire to research, and demonstrate its originality and value.

For example: ‘The environmental and social impacts of mass housing in Latin American countries’, or ‘Using water efficiently: understanding the impact of expanding middle-class demand on city water systems’.

A key question, hypothesis or the broad topic for investigation

You need key questions or hypotheses to drive your research. These will need to be original, timely and of importance to the discipline.

This could involve investigating something that no-one has looked at before, or it might mean taking a fresh approach to an existing topic or issue.

An outline of the key aims of the research

What will the PhD do?

Your aims will be broader than the questions/hypotheses. They should give a prospective statement about the overall destination of the PhD and its potential impact: in other words, what is the wider value of the research, and why does it matter?

This needs to be set within a brief overview, giving enough background to your research context to demonstrate that this research aim is credible and worthwhile: you do not need to give a great deal of factual detail.

A brief outline of key literature in the area (what we already know)

Situate your topic with reference to the existing research literature.

At PhD level, a literature review is more than simply a descriptive mapping exercise, it should cite key theories or debates and suggest how your project would engage with them. 

Explain how these ideas motivate your work, and how your thesis might support, extend, or challenge existing work.

A description of the topic and an explanation of why further research in the area is important (the gap in the literature - what we need to know)

Highlight what the gap in current knowledge is and how your research will contribute original scholarship.

Will your research provide a new perspective, generate new evidence, challenge existing assumptions?

By whom might the PhD be valued: scholars looking at a particular issue, communities within specific institutions, certain groups of people?

Provide further clarity on the specific focus of your research through a short list of questions (three to six is normal) that your research will answer.

These questions must be achievable within the framework of a PhD (within the usual three-and-a-half years tuition fee-paying period - with typically a maximum of around 12 months of fieldwork/data collection time).

Details of how the research will be carried out (the tools that will enable us to fill the gap you have identified)

This includes any special facilities or resources required and any necessary skills which you either have already or would need to acquire.

A clear methodological statement shows how you will execute your research project: it is relatively easy to ask a new question; it is more challenging to set out how you might come up with a convincing answer.

Outline your approach to your research as well as the methods you will use.

Of course, the resources you will need will vary according to the nature of the research: access to a particular archive, specialist library, visits to field sites, the use of analytical software, access to databases, training, workshop attendance and so on.

It is important to list any of these resources and give a very brief account of how their role in your research.

What is important is that there are coherent links between your aims, questions and proposed methods – why is using this evidence going to provide the most robust answer to your questions?

A plan and timetable of the work you will carry out

Submission of the PhD is expected to take place by the end of the tuition fee-paying period, which for most PhD candidates will be at three and a half years from the date of commencing PhD study.

Show how you will carry out your research within that timeframe. Try to be as detailed as you can at this stage.