If you’re writing a thesis, dissertation, or research proposal, there’s a good chance you’ve come across the terms scope and delimitations and felt a bit unsure about what they mean.
These terms are often poorly explained and inconsistently used across disciplines, which can lead to worry about misunderstanding them and miscommunicating your work.
The good news? Scope and delimitations are simply a way of clearly explaining the boundaries of your research. When described well, they actually make your work easier to understand, assess, and defend.
In this post, I’ll explain:
- What scope and delimitations are and why they matter in research
- How scope and delimitations differ from limitations
- Common mistakes to avoid when defining the scope and delimitations of your own research
I’ll also walk through a scope and delimitations example you can adapt for your own work.
By the end of the post, you should feel clearer about what both terms mean and more confident about how to define them for your own research.
Let’s begin!
What Are Scope and Delimitations?
At a high level, scope and delimitations describe the boundaries of your research.
They explain:
- What/who your paper studies
- What/who your paper does not study
- And why those boundaries are reasonable and intentional
It’s important to note that although they’re closely related, scope and delimitations are not quite the same thing.
Scope defines what’s studied, while delimitations define who or what is excluded.
Let’s now look at what each of them means in more detail.
What Is the Scope of a Study?
The scope defines the overall focus and extent of your research.
It sets out:
- The topic or problem being studied
- The population, data, or materials involved
- The time period covered
- The geographical or contextual boundaries
- The key variables, methods, or perspectives included
In other words, the scope answers the question:
What is this research about, and how far does it go?
The scope gives the reader a clear sense of what they should expect from your study – and just as importantly, what they shouldn’t expect.
Why defining scope matters
Defining your scope helps to:
- Keep your research focused and manageable
- Prevent “scope creep” as your project grows
- Set realistic expectations for examiners/reviewers and readers
- Demonstrate that you understand the scale of your research project
It can be tempting to try and run a single study which tries to really push the boundaries of what is possible. However, it’s useful to think about what is realistic and achievable with the time and resources you have available. Therefore, I’d say that defining the scope of your study is as much about helping you plan your work as it is about summarising it afterwards for readers.
Without a clear scope, a project can quickly become unfocused, overwhelming, or impossible to complete within the time available.
Example from my recent project
Recently I’ve been working on an ambitious project where we’re trying to create a global methane emissions estimation system. It is quite intimidating to go from an idea to something which works for the entire world!
Therefore we’ve started off by demonstrating it working for several years on a small (ish!) region of the world. We chose that region and time period as the study’s scope because we can easily compare against previous studies.
Our first paper showing all of this was recently accepted at a top journal in the field – if you’re curious you can read it here. We’re now expanding the scope to cover other regions of the world and longer periods of time.
Brief note on “salami slicing”
As a quick aside, you may come across the idea of “salami slicing” research papers at some point in your academic journey. This refers to the notion of dividing up research that could be one paper into lots of smaller papers – each with a narrower scope.
There can be merit in splitting off certain parts of the work into their own papers but generally “salami slicing” is seen as a negative term: when a research team are trying to get as many papers out of a single bit of work as possible rather than having one nice impactful paper.
What Are Delimitations?
Delimitations are the specific choices you make to narrow the scope of your study.
They explain:
- What you deliberately chose not to include
- The criteria you used to make those choices
- Why those decisions are appropriate for your research aims
Delimitations are not about weaknesses or problems. They’re about design decisions.
A useful way to think about delimitations is that they answer the question:
What could this study have included, but intentionally didn’t?
Examples of delimitations
Delimitations might include decisions such as:
- Focusing on one age group rather than all ages
- Studying a single city instead of making national or international comparisons
- Using one method rather than multiple approaches
- Analysing data from a specific time period only
These decisions don’t necessarily make your research worse. In fact, they usually make it stronger by keeping it focused. They can certainly make the study more achievable to complete, as well as quicker to write up and submit.
Going back to my earlier example of the methane emissions work, we certainly could have tried to get it working on more regions of the world and present all of those results together. However, it is often more sensible to start small and validate that the approach works then expand out from there.
Here are a few other examples of delimitations from studies I’ve been involved with:
- Applying machine learning to try and understand policy decisions for climate change, rather than all policies.
- Demonstrating the technique on cow (bovine) tissue samples rather than humans. The follow-up study built on this work and applied it to a new technique, using human samples.
Scope and Delimitations vs Limitations
Although the terms sound similar, delimitations and limitations are two different things and mixing them up is very common.
Delimitations
- Are intentional
- Are within your control
- Arise from research design choices
Limitations
- Are usually unavoidable constraints
- Are often outside your control
- Arise from practical or methodological challenges
For example:
- Choosing to study a certain geographical region or age range of patients is a delimitation: you’ve consciously made that choice, and usually for good reason.
- Having a small sample size due to recruitment difficulties is a limitation: you’d rarely choose to have fewer participants or samples in an experiment.
Participant limitation actually came up in a recent interview study I was conducting as we could not include a certain group of medics: “No consultants were recruited due to staffing issues, as acknowledged in the limitations section.” This was very clearly not something we chose to do on purpose.
How Scope and Delimitations Relate to Research Questions
A useful way to sanity-check your scope and delimitations is to trace them directly back to your research questions and the aims of your study.
If a variable, population, method, or comparison doesn’t help you answer your research questions, it probably doesn’t belong in the study. This is also a strong way to justify exclusions (ie delimitations) if reviewers or examiners question them later.
Clear scope and delimitations show that your project is focused on answering specific questions, rather than trying to do everything at once.
How Examiners and Reviewers View Scope and Delimitations
Examiners and reviewers are not looking for a single research study that covers everything. They’re looking for research that:
- Knows what it’s trying to do
- Is feasible within the available time and resources
- Makes sensible, transparent design choices
- Addresses, and aims to answer, the study’s research questions
Clear scope and delimitations help reviewers and examiners to understand your project more quickly and assess it more fairly.
Whenever I’m reviewing a paper, having a clearly defined scope, delimitations, and research questions, all help to immediately set the scene for me. They’re also hard to critique. By clearly stating them within your work you’ll actually reduce the likelihood of critical comments, because expectations have already been set.
Want to read more about perspectives from being a reviewer? I previously wrote an article about my experiences.
A tightly scoped project with well-justified delimitations often comes across as more rigorous than a sprawling one that tries to do too much.
An example from work I supervised
I previously supervised an undergraduate for their final year project: a research project spanning about four months of the final year of their degree.
In the work they decided to focus on demonstrating their work on data from one city, and their scope was defined as such. If they had instead claimed that the technique could be applied anywhere, then demonstrating it only in one city would have been a weakness and a limitation of the work. In other words: setting a well defined (and constrained) scope neutralised potential criticism from examiners.
We went on to publish their work at a prestigious workshop at a top AI conference, with excellent reviews. You can read the paper here: Improving local air quality predictions using transfer learning on satellite data and graph neural networks.
Where Scope and Delimitations Appear
Depending on your discipline and institution, scope and delimitations might appear:
- In your research paper or thesis, within the methodology section. For example for things such as inclusion and exclusion criteria. Sometimes in a thesis or dissertation they might even have their own subsection.
- In a research proposal or grant application. For example I recently was involved with a grant application explicitly looking to study 18-24 year old males.
Sometimes they’re combined into a single section and sometimes they’re addressed separately. Both approaches are usually acceptable, as long as the boundaries of the study are clear.
How to Write Scope and Delimitations Clearly
When writing about scope and delimitations, clarity matters more than length.
You don’t need to justify every decision in exhaustive detail. What matters is showing that your key choices were thoughtful, intentional, and appropriate for your research aims.
One simple way to approach this is to:
- Clearly state what the study focuses on
- Explain the main boundaries of the research
- Briefly justify key exclusions where needed
In most cases, a few clear sentences are enough. If an examiner or reviewer wants more detail, they’ll ask.
My advice?
- Make sure you think about your scope and delimitations while planning your research – don’t leave them until you’re writing up! This will help to give you clarity whilst conducting the research.
- See how some similar papers to your work describe their scope and delimitations. This will give you a useful starting point which you can then draft your own around, then run them past your supervisor or co-authors as part of a draft.
Useful sentence starters for scope and delimitations
If you’re staring with a blank page, these prompts may help you get started. You don’t need to use them word-for-word, they’re just there to get you thinking.
For scope:
- This research investigates…
- The study explores…
- This study focuses on…
For delimitations:
- The research is limited to…
- This study does not include…
- The following have been excluded from this research…
Three common mistakes
When writing up your scope and delimitations it’s important to be aware of the following.
- Making the scope too broad – Trying to cover too much can raise concerns about feasibility. Your research project doesn’t need to answer everything. It needs to answer something well. Unless you have the resources and data to confidently answer a research question with a broad scope, it is often more sensible to set a more modest scope. For example, demonstrating something in a specific group of participants, or under certain conditions, rather than implying that it suits all people or conditions.
- Apologising for delimitations – Phrases like ‘unfortunately’ or ‘only’ undermine sensible decisions and make them appear more like limitations due to poor planning or execution. Remember that delimitations are conscious decisions to make for a better defined scope and make the study’s aims more achievable.
- Confusing delimitations with limitations – If it was a conscious design choice, it’s a delimitation. Save limitations for genuine constraints. To figure out if something is a limitation or delimitation you can ask yourself: did you make this decision before undertaking the research? If so, it’s usually a delimitation.
A quick checklist when reviewing your scope and delimitations
- Is the topic clearly defined?
- Are the population and context specified?
- Have intentional exclusions been explained?
- Are delimitations linked to research aims or questions?
- Could a reader clearly understand what the study does not cover?
A Scope and Delimitations Example
Here’s a simplified scope and delimitations example you can adapt.
The black text describes the scope, while the orange text explicitly outlines the delimitations.
“This study investigates the impact of remote working on job satisfaction among full-time employees in the UK technology sector between 2020 and 2023. The research focuses on employees aged 25–55 working in medium to large organisations. Data is collected using online surveys and semi-structured interviews.
The scope of the study is limited to full-time employees and does not include freelancers, part-time workers, or self-employed individuals. The study focuses exclusively on the UK and does not make international comparisons. Remote working is defined as working from home at least three days per week, and hybrid models outside this definition are excluded.“
Revisiting Scope and Delimitations as Your Project Evolves
It’s important to know that scope and delimitations don’t have to be fixed from the start of your project.
As you review the literature, collect data, or run preliminary analyses, your understanding of the problem may change. New avenues to collect, access, or analyse data may become available. Revisiting and refining your scope or delimitations isn’t a sign that you planned badly. Instead, it’s often a sign that your thinking has matured.
What matters is that any changes are:
- Justified in relation to your research questions
- Reflected consistently throughout your writing
Final Thoughts
Scope and delimitations are about clarity, not restriction.
They’re there to help you define what your research is, without needing to apologise for what it isn’t.
When written well, they show that you understand your project, your field, and the practical realities of doing research with limited time and resources.
If you’re feeling unsure about your scope or delimitations, that’s completely normal – especially early on. Most projects don’t start perfectly defined. What matters is that you’re making thoughtful, intentional choices, and can explain them clearly.
And remember: no research project, dissertation, or academic paper is meant to answer everything. Focused research is not a weakness, it’s what makes good research possible!
If you’re keen to learn more about writing an academic journal paper be sure to check out my whole series on that topic.
I hope this post provided some clarity for you. Are there any other research terms which you’d like explained? Let me know in the comments!
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