What information must a research proposal for the scholarship application contain?

This overview serves as a guide and covers the basic requirements for a research proposal (Exposé). When applying for scholarships, however, you should always read carefully and, if necessary, ask the funding institutions directly what requirements the respective proposal should fulfil. Sometimes the individual points are called differently and/or there are additional points that should be covered in the proposal.

Title page

(working) title of the project, name, date

Introduction

The introduction should give the reader a brief, precise impression of the project presented and familiarise them with the project. To achieve this, it is often advisable to place the project in a wider context. The introduction should be able to answer the following questions: What is the starting point of the project? In what larger context is the work embedded? What does the project contribute to the academic community, or how does it benefit the general public? Why is it necessary to deal with the aspects/questions/theories that you plan to address?

Hypotheses and objectives

In this part, the basic hypotheses and your research interest should be presented and explained. What phenomena/questions are to be investigated? What will your central argument be? And finally: What goals are to be achieved and what insights can be gained by examining your problem? It is often helpful to subdivide one/more main objectives into respective sub-objectives.

State of research

This part clarifies which researchers are already working on the topic or related topics. Which questions have already been raised by the scientific community? Which aspects that are necessary to clarify current questions have been neglected so far? What methods have researchers used so far to approach the topic and how, if applicable, should these methods be changed/improved?

Methods

This section explains how your stated objectives are to be achieved. What methods will you use to examine and explain the issues raised? Which concepts are fundamentally important for dealing with the topic and how can they be adapted, if necessary, to achieve the goals?

Own preliminary work

Here you clarify what preliminary work has already been done. Has a similar aspect already been dealt with in your masters’ thesis? Which reference works have been consulted so far? Have you already been in contact with other researchers? Has the topic/aspects of the topic already been presented in a paper at a conference?

Preliminary outline

Preliminary work plan
What research goals are to be achieved at what point in time/within which period of time? Even though changes will naturally occur in the course of the project, it is important, especially for grant applications, to estimate as precisely as possible which work steps are to be completed when and which (partial) milestone is to be achieved when.

Bibliography

If applicable, not only the works cited in the proposal should appear here, but also other literature relevant to the research topic.