The Research Paper Proposal
The Research Project (35% of grade)
Proposal and Initial Reference biblio -- 5%Your proposal should be 2-3 pages long, not counting bibliography and xeroxes and/or print-outs of material which you should also attach. Before you turn in your proposal, you should have done an extensive bibliographical search on your topic, using specialized bibliographies and indexes, as well as on-line services such as LUIS, CU Explorer, the MLA Bibliography, bibliographies in the textbook and in books on reserve, and search engines such as Infoseek, or whatever else might be relevant. You do not have to type up a formal bibliography, but you do need to include your notes, xeroxes, and print-outs with most relevant citations highlighted and notes as to whether these sources are available at Clemson or not. Your proposal should cover the following the following areas, arranged however you find most useful:
Definition of topic -- including its relevance to this class. You must narrow your topic down to a do-able level of specificity. A survey of the treatment of women in the history of SF films is just too broad to do a good job of in only 8 pages. Can you focus in on a few movies in particular? A decade? A character type? One way to do this is to define your topic in terms of questions you want to answer.
Whether you are doing a website or a traditional research paper -- Need to alert us as to what format you intend to use. Are you doing an annotated biblio plus short paper, or a longer paper? If you want to so a website, what would be on it? How many pages? Do you already have the expertise to do this? What help do you need from us?
Keywords -- This is part of the bibliographic process. What are the keywords that you are discovering are central to your topic? Under what subjects do you find references in LUIS, MLA, Infoseek, or specialized bibliographies? What words in a title let you know that an article will be relevant to your topic? What journals tend to publish articles on your topic? Who are the most important experts?
Status of bibliographic search -- Here you must tell us basically where you are in the research process. What did you start out knowing about the topic? Where did you go from there? You need to have looked up the topic in several indices or bibliographies and to have seen that there are enough books and articles about it. Are there enough resources in the Clemson library for you to work with? Do we have the books and the periodicals containing articles you need to consult? You should have probably already gone to the library stacks and actually put your hands on the sources that look most central. (You can include xeroxes of articles you’ve found with the proposal.) Do these sources have bibliographies or references that you can also use?
At the point of turning in your proposal, you probably will not have found everything you are going to find on your topic, but you should have made a good, solid start -- most bibliographies will list at least 15 sources, since a fair number of these are going to turn out to be irrelevant or not available.
What are you going to contribute? What is your paper or web site going to add to the total sum of human knowledge on this subject? Or to sound less intimidating, how are you going to twist, combine, or add to your sources? What is your slant? If you are doing a traditional research project, what are you going to do that previous articles haven’t done? If you are doing a website, how is your site going to be different from those already out there?
Anticipated Problems and Next Move -- Where do you think you are going to have the most trouble doing this project? What's going to get you hung up? Are you going to be able to deal with these problems? How?
Where are you going to go from here? What other sources are there that you haven't yet consulted? What other aspects of the topic do you need to take into consideration?
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Last update: 2/18/98
