Your tasks in this assignment are to prepare the elements of a Preliminary Research Proposal. This
trial proposal would help you to prepare the proposal in your final year Research Project in the
courses ENG4111/ENG4112 or PSG4111/PSG4112). You should review the structure of the sample
Research Proposal provided in this course. You are likely to use different chapter and section
headings, but those in the sample are a useful guide.
You should concentrate on the key elements of Introduction (i.e. idea development, background,
literature review, knowledge gap identification and study justification) and Methodology (i.e. project
planning, materials and methods, etc.) in this assignment. The research proposal will also require the
addition of an abstract and a final version of a brief Literature Review. The literature review needs to
be incorporated (as a sub-heading) in the introduction section.
Task 1: Project Topic
Please remember that at this stage, no formal approval of your research topic is needed. Indeed, it is a
“trial” research topic for a final year Engineering or Spatial Science Research Project. This
process will help you to develop your final research topic selection and research proposal next year in
courses ENG4111/ENG4112 or PSG4111/PSG4112.
Task 2: Literature review and project feasibility analysis
You should develop a brief but solid review of literature with a clear focus on your chosen project.
This will help determine the scope of the project and allow you to conduct a project feasibility
analysis. During the literature review, you will also be able to ‘borrow’ methodology ideas from the
reviewed articles. Please remember that the key function of literature review is to identify what WAS
NOT done so far. Please do NOT use a simple annotated bibliography from your assignment 1. While
the articles found in assignment 1 can form the basis of your literature review, a proper literature
review is very different from a simple list of annotated bibliography.
Task 3: Identify the key steps required as part of your project methodology
Identify the key phases of work that will occur as part of your project, and expand on these by adding
as much detail as possible. Where possible, identify the individual task descriptions appropriate to
each phase. You should also look back at your aim and objectives regularly to ensure that your
methodology is addressing these appropriately.