Proposal Writing

Steps for a planning a research project: This list of steps for a more or less "universal".
  1. What has been done? Review of journals and conference reprints for recent years.
  2. What is being done? Personal communications with other researchers turned up in your step-1 literature search.
  3. What needs to be done? Critical analysis of the results of steps 1 and 2 and any programmatic review (or overview) documents from funding agencies.
  4. What method(s) of data analysis or modeling can be used to solve the problems identified in step 3? Critical thinking is required here.
  5. What data are required in order to use the methods chosen in step 4 to solve the problem identified in step 3? More critical thinking is required here.
  6. Is this data available? Search web data archives, NCDC, NCAR, etc.
  7. If the result of 6 is not positive, cycle back to step 4.
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This page was last updated by George Young on November 22, 2000