/research-proposal
/research-proposal — Transforms the synthesized gap and theoretical framework into a fundable, reviewable plan-of-record: SMART aims, feasibility and risk register, impact pathway, preregistration plan, and EQUATOR reporting-guideline selection — the proposal stage of the /research pipeline, between /research-synthesis and /research-design.
Role: Principal Investigator (plan-of-record) Pipeline position: mid-chain
Transforms the synthesized gap and theoretical framework into a fundable, reviewable plan-of-record. Ethics feasibility is surfaced up front, and the preregistration plan and reporting-guideline selection are fixed before any study design is operationalized.
Canonical invocation
/research-proposalWith arguments:
/research-proposal [--suite-name NAME] [--override] [--guideline NAME] [--prereg-registry NAME]Inputs
The suite's _inputs/synthesis.md (the SOTA map + gap analysis) and _inputs/theory.md (the conceptual framework).
Outputs
_inputs/proposal.md (the SMART aims hierarchy, the feasibility assessment, the resource / timeline / risk register, the impact pathway, the preregistration plan, and the EQUATOR reporting-guideline pre-selection).
Downstream
/research-design (downstream consumer — operationalizes the proposal into a frozen, preregistered study design).
Workflow phases
The command follows the standard /research pipeline workflow:
- Load context — Read
_inputs/synthesis.mdand_inputs/theory.md, the rules, and any existing suite state. - Build the SMART aims hierarchy — Turn the gap into specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound aims.
- Assess feasibility and risk — Build the resource / timeline / risk register; surface ethics feasibility up front.
- Plan preregistration and reporting — Select the registry, draft the preregistration plan, and pre-select the EQUATOR reporting guideline.
- Map the impact pathway — Trace how the aims, if met, produce downstream impact.
- Verify and emit — Confirm the aims are testable and the plan reproducible; emit
_inputs/proposal.mdplus the handoff manifest.
Rigor floor
The target-venue ambition sets not only the reporting-guideline choice but the depth of the rigor floor the downstream design and experiment stages must clear — replication floor, budget parity, tuning on disjoint splits, and significance with an effect size — plus the reproducibility-evidence package the deliverable will carry.
Failure modes
| Symptom | Cause | Recovery |
|---|---|---|
| Aim is not measurable | Goal stated as activity, not outcome | Re-frame as a SMART aim with an explicit success metric |
| No preregistration plan | Preregistration step skipped | Select a registry and draft the plan before proceeding to /research-design |
| Missing synthesis input | /research-synthesis not yet run | Run /research-synthesis first to produce the gap analysis |
Examples
# Turn the gap into a fundable plan-of-record
/research-proposal --suite-name retrieval-latency
# Pin the reporting guideline and preregistration registry
/research-proposal --guideline PRISMA --prereg-registry OSFCross-references
/research-synthesis
/research-synthesis — Reconciles the collected sources into a state-of-the-art map and literature matrix, adversarially verifies every claim, and states the explicit research gap.
/research-design
/research-design — Operationalizes the hypotheses into testable predictions and designs the study (variables, controls, sample, power), then freezes the analysis plan as a preregistration.