Your research outline should be no more than two-pages. If you can get it in under that, even better.
The audience for your research outline is you (clarifying and documenting your ideas), potential collaborators and anyone you might need to involve to get the project done.
This will invariably include non-experts. It is very easy to write research proposals with jargon that you are very comfortable with, but may cause confusion who doesn’t work in your disciplinary niche. Avoid acronyms and write for an educated non-expert.
Identifying a need
This is a targeted critical review of the literature. The term critical synthesis is apt because it is typically necessary for you to propose an interpretation on the literature that goes beyond what is said in individual papers. You are bringing together ideas in a way that is novel (or, at least, not yet considered the ‘received view’), or you are identifying a problem or gap that is yet to be addressed.
Your critical synthesis is best seen as an argument. You are providing an argument for your particular interpretation of the current literature, its strengths, weaknesses and gaps. You are also providing an argument for conducting the research and for defining the research question in the way that you have.
It is important that the argument is targeted to your research question. You are not writing a textbook.
Writing a good critical synthesis is a skill. Like any skill, it benefits from practice. Doing this well requires the application of your critical appraisal skills to a body of literature rather than a single paper. Systematic review and meta-analyses, if available, can be helpful for providing a picture of where things are at—but the findings from these types of publication also need to be put into a broader context. Seek out constructive feedback and be open to reviewing your synthesis in light of that feedback.
Aim
You will get differing advice regarding writing study ‘aims’ and ‘objectives’, and there are a host of other related terms that overlap (‘specific aims’, ‘research objectives’, etc). Compare the advice provided in Rout and Aldous (2016) and Al Jundi and Sakka (2016).
My suggestion is to use the ‘aim’ to communicate the purpose of the study. The aim should directly fall out of your critical synthesis (someone who has only read your critical synthesis should be able to infer your aim).
The aim needs to be tightly linked to your research question and identified need. But it is a statement of purpose as opposed to a well-sepecified research question. but it is stated in a boarder way than your research.
Have a look at Foot et al. (2017) and Krass et al. (2017). Foot et al. (2017) provides an aim at the end of the introduction that is a purpose statement. Krass et al. (2017) provides ‘Trial Objectives’ and ‘Hypotheses’ rather than ‘Aims’ and ‘Research Question’—but they are achieving similar ends.
Asking a focused research question
Ueda and Merabet (2018) is particularly helpful on this topic, and I use some of their categories below.
You want to state a focused research question. You might have more than one focused research question, but even here, you want to be clear which of your research questions is the primary research question.
In the same way that your critical synthesis should lead directly to your aim. Your aim should lead directly to your research question. And your research question should lead directly to your methods.
A complete research proposal should be like a jigsaw puzzle. The critical synthesis, aims, research questions, … , all need to fit together neatly to produce a picture of your planned research. As you develop one of the pieces, e.g. research question, aim, ethics or methods, you frequently need to go back and make sure that each of the other pieces still fit neatly.
Criteria
Use the following criteria help you to further specify your research question.
Importance/Contribution
The research needs to make a contribution. It needs to address a need, answer a question, improve a measure, or provide a new way of thinking about some thing.
Feasibility
You need to be able to conduct the research. You need the skills, resources, access to participants and time. There is not much point in a bold, novel research question if you are unable to conduct the study that would answer it.
Answerability
The question needs to be answerable in a very specific sense. This aspect of a research question start to hint at the key methods that will be employed. The research question should make it clear what you are measuring or seeking to explain.
It should be clear how a study could be designed and analysed to provide an answer to the question—it should be possible to articulate who? what? where? how? and/or how much?
Ethics
All the ethical issues that could arise in the study need to be addressed (and addressable). A research question that can’t be conducted due to risks to participants is neither answerable nor feasible.
Clearly, the criteria come in conflict. Developing research questions (and the subsequent research proposal) is all about making decisions about trade-offs such as these.
Build the research question
PICOT—participants, intervention (exposure), control (comparison), outcome, time—provides an appropriate framework for developing many of research questions in the clinical sciences.
The research question should make clear: who are the participants? what comparisons are being made? what will you measure over what time frame?
Not all research questions of interest to clinical pharmacists fit this framework exactly, but it provides an useful model even for different research questions.
This website provides some nice examples of research questions that can be improved.
It is worth noting that qualitative research doesn’t always lend itself to a focused research question. For many qualitative research projects the driving research question is more open; an exploration or examination, rather than a test of a very specific hypothesis. For these kinds of projects it may be more appropriate to have a fairly open research question and provide some of the additional details regarding the specific characteristics of the participants and context that you are exploring in the details that you provide along with the open primary research question. Sometimes these more focuses aspects can be provided as additional research questions.
Methods
You don’t need to specify your methods in a research outline, but some key aspects of your methods should be clear given your aim and research question.
These key aspects are all part of a good research question—what are you comparing? in whom? what are you measuring? etc.
We talk more about methods in the next module.
References
Al Jundi, Azzam, and Salah Sakka. 2016. “Protocol writing in clinical research.” Journal of Clinical and Diagnostic Research 10 (11): ZE10–ZE13. doi:10.7860/JCDR/2016/21426.8865.
Foot, Holly, Christopher Freeman, Karla Hemming, Ian Scott, Ian D. Coombes, Ian D. Williams, Luke Connelly, et al. 2017. “Reducing Medical Admissions into Hospital through Optimising Medicines (REMAIN HOME) Study: Protocol for a stepped-wedge, cluster-randomised trial.” BMJ Open 7 (4): 1–9. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2016-015301.
Krass, Ines, Rob Carter, Bernadette Mitchell, Mohammadreza Mohebbi, Sophy T F Shih, Peta Trinder, Vincent L Versace, Frances Wilson, and Kevin Mc Namara. 2017. “Pharmacy Diabetes Screening Trial: protocol for a pragmatic cluster-randomised controlled trial to compare three screening methods for undiagnosed type 2 diabetes in Australian community pharmacy.” BMJ Open 7 (12). British Medical Journal Publishing Group: e017725. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2017-017725.
Rout, Christopher C., and Colleen Aldous. 2016. “How to write a research protocol.” Southern African Journal of Anaesthesia and Analgesia 22 (4). Taylor & Francis: 101–7. doi:10.1080/22201181.2016.1216664.
Ueda, Keiko, and Lofti B. Merabet. 2018. “Selection of the research question.” In Critical Thinking in Clinical Research, edited by Felipe Fregni and Ben M. W. Illigens, 26–37. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.