Write a Research Proposal in 2 Hours, Not a Day! ⏱️

With help of AI, you can draft a solid research proposal in just a couple of hours instead of days. Here's how:

Let's say, we need to write a research proposal on NLP (Natural Language Processing), classifications of social media posts.

Step 1: Come up with some research ideas
Open Perplexity Comet, browse aclanthology.org and search for the keywords "social media"
Add more keywords if needed like GNN, multimodal, sentiment analysis, misinformation, disinformation, BERT, transformers, etc.

Notes:

Browse more sources like ACM NLP conference papers, Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, etc if needed.

Open all the papers on new tabs in Comet. Now I have 40 papers to read through, not manually, but with AI assistance!

Talk to "Comet" with a prompt: Research all open tabs and give me 10 research questions about classifications of social media posts. Cite the sources.

Step 2: Narrow down to 3 research ideas
Read through all 10 research ideas from Comet and pick 3 that I like the most.
Manually refine the 3 research ideas to make them more specific.
Talk the Comet again with a prompt:

Suggest me a research proposal title and abstract based on the following 3 research questions:

1. [Refined Research Question 1]
2. [Refined Research Question 2]
3. [Refined Research Question 3]

Step 3: Prepare a working directory
The folder structure looks like this:

research-proposal/
├── main.tex
├── Makefile
├── styles/. # User-defined LaTeX styles, overleaf templates, etc
├── references.bib # Bibtex file for references with abstract field included
├── refereneces/ # Downloaded papers go here, not mandatory
└── samples/ # Sample research proposals in LaTeX format for reference
Step 4 Prepare references.bib
Use Comet to extract Bibtex entries from all the papers I opened in Step 1.
The next magic starts here:

Write the research proposal
Open Cursor and use the following prompt to write the research proposal in one go:

Help me write a research proposal.

Save your response to main.tex

Create a Makefile to compile the LaTeX document with targets:

all: compile the document
pdf: compile to PDF
clean: remove auxiliary files
bib: compile the bibliography
view: open the compiled PDF
Title: {}

Research questions:

[Refined Research Question 1]
[Refined Research Question 2]
[Refined Research Question 3]
The structure o the research proposal should include the following sections:

Background
Current Research Landscape and Related Work
Research Motivation
Research Questions: Include the 3 research questions above
Methodology
Requirements
Timeline
References: Use the Bibtex entries from references.bib
Requirements:

Only cite the papers from the references.bib file, don't make up any citations.
Compiled PDF file should be less than 6 pages.
Tone should be formal and academic.
Methodology section should explain how I plan to answer the research questions.
Methodology section should include a diagram illustrating the research framework using LaTeX packages like tikz
Requirements section should list the hardware, software, datasets, and other resources needed for the research.
Timeline section should include a Gantt chart showing the timeline of the research activities over 36 months, with milestones and deliverables using LaTeX packages like pgfgantt
make sure make pdf command works without errors.
Additional requirements:

Refer to samples/research-proposal1.tex and samples/*.tex for formatting and structure guidance.
Step 5: Humanize and finalize
Humanize the text. I use stealthwriter or naturalwrite
Read through the generated main.tex file and make necessary edits to improve clarity, coherence, and flow.