Research Plan¶
Weeks 1-2
The next key step in conducting scientific research is to make a research plan. This will summarise the motivation for your project, its aim(s), the methods you intend to use in your experiments, and the expected outcomes of the project. A well-written research plan can make it much more straightforward to conduct experiments and write them up.
I would suggest trying to summarise the following on a single side of A4:
The clinical background to the project: 1- 2 sentences
The problem being tackled: 1- 2 sentences
Current approaches to tackling this problem: 1- 2 sentences
The aim(s) of this project: 1- 2 sentences, indicating how your project will help tackle the problem. You could have an overall aim, and then a few (perhaps 3) objectives, where each objective refers to a research question which you intend to answer.
The methods to be used in this project: 4-5 sentences providing key details of the methods you intend to use, such as the dataset and a brief overview of the analyses you will conduct. You may find it helpful to split the methods into parts (e.g. one part per research question).
The expected outcomes: 1- 2 sentences on how this project will help tackle the problem.
The research plan does not need to be detailed - for instance, you probably won’t know at this stage how many participants are in the dataset, or which statistical tests you might perform. Rather, it should provide a high-level summary of the project.