Synopsis Template

The synopsis is the document your doctoral committee approves before you begin, and it fixes the scope of what you are authorised to research. Treat it as a contract rather than a formality — changing your topic substantially after approval usually means going back through the committee.

Indian universities vary in their required format, so check your own institution's regulations before adopting any structure, including this one. What is near-universal is the sequence: background, literature and gap, problem, objectives, hypotheses, methodology, chapterisation and references.

The section that draws the most scrutiny is objectives. Each one should be specific enough that a reader can tell exactly what data would satisfy it, and each should be answerable by a method you have named in the methodology section. Vague objectives such as to study the impact are the single most common reason a synopsis is returned.