The Literature Review/Project Proposal

The aim of the literature review and project proposal is two-fold: to ensure that you are familiar with previous work that is relevant to your topic, and to focus your ideas regarding the scope of work to be carried out for the rest of the year. It must be less than 4,000 words in length in total, including all text, figures, appendices and so on, but not including the table of contents or the references. See Appendix 1 of your welcome documents for more information.

The literature review/project proposal has the following components:

Title Page

Give your project title. Don’t forget to give your name!

Table of contents

Optional for a document of this length

Aims and Background

This would usually be the longest section of the work. Here, you state what you plan to achieve in this project and critically review previous work that has been performed. A “critical review” is one in which the reviewer uses their knowledge and judgment to compare and contrast the often conflicting evidence of previous workers to achieve a balanced view of the current state of understanding of a particular issue. Note that this is much more than just saying whether a piece of work is “good” or not, but rather detailing whether previous work has made significant scientific progress or has appropriately addressed the issue at hand. Moreover, once your review has been performed, several unresolved issues should present themselves – in other words, what is not yet understood about your topic should become clear. The aims of your project should emerge from the outcome of the critical review.

Significance and Innovation

Briefly explain the importance of the proposed project. What new results will be obtained? If the results are negative, will this also be useful information, and why? If the project is successful, how will this advance our understanding, and how could the results of the project be used?

Approach

Detail the specifics of how the results will be obtained. Discuss the various techniques to be employed for gathering and analysis of data. Convince the reader that these techniques are appropriate to the project and likely to lead to a successful outcome, and that any analyses will be completed well in advance of the project deadline.

Conclusion

In a paragraph or two, summarize the review and proposal.

References

Of course.