You need to deliver a research proposal for a research project of your choice. This research proposal is the only deliverable and counts for 100% of the final grade.

We have a transparent assessment policy, and you can participate in our peer review process to practice how we assess your research proposal. You can also find a slide set here with detailed assessment criteria for 2025.

The research proposal will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

  • Purpose: You should convince the reader about the purpose of your project by motivating and referring to existing literature that support your thesis/hypothesis. You should also clarify your research questions justified by the purpose. (30%)
  • Contributions: You should demonstrate that you have a clear understanding of what new knowledge or other new products, processes, models, theories etc. you add to the existing knowledge. Important to show that your contribution is novel. (10%)
  • Research method: You need to show and convince your reader about the decisions you have made regarding research strategy and data generation and analysis methods. (35%)
  • Participants: If you plan to evaluate your thesis with users you need to describe this. Any other dependency on people or resources (e.g. experts you need to interview, data sets you need access to) needs to be written here. You also need to discuss the ethical aspects related to your participants and how you plan to handle these. (10%)
  • Research paradigm: You should read the related chapters in the book and try to describe what paradigm you are in, positivist, interpretivism or critical research. Discuss this with your supervisor. (5%)
  • Dissemination: Will this be a report, a video, a demonstration, presentation etc.? How do you justify the presentation form you have chosen? Who is it for? (5%)
  • References: Do you have a well-formatted reference list with all bibliographic data? Are your references scientifically high-quality and relevant for your research? (5%)

The research proposal should be maximum 1200 words (excluding the administrative front page and references to literature) and include a front-page with some mandatory information such as your name and the word count.

Delivery date and how to deliver the final research proposal: See Administrative information page.

Here are two templates for the (voluntary) intermediate version and the (mandatory) final version:

  • Version 1.0: Voluntary intermediate version that you submit when you register to the mid-term peer review workshop. See course front-page for dates. Template here.
  • Final version: Mandatory final version to be delivered by the exam deadline. Template here. (For dates and how to deliver see Administrative information page).

Note: the templates have some explanatory/help text (in cursive). Remove all this text (but leave the front page). (If you use other template, the front-page should show 1) name of student, 2) title of the project, 3) number of words excluding front page and references).

W have started to collect some examples of research plans that have received (almost) full score in earlier years. You can find them here (note that our assessment criteria might have been changed since these reports were evaluated):



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