If you are a young researcher, or eventually still finishing your studies, you’ll probably notice that your academic environment revolves around certain research topics, probably linked to your department or to the interest of your mentor and direct colleagues. For example, if your department is currently doing research in nanotechnology applied to medicine, it is only a natural that you feel compelled to follow this line of research – for its hopefully something you feel familiar with and interested in – although you might take your own twists and turns along your career.
Many scientists end up continuing their academic legacy during their professional careers, writing about their own practical experiences in the field and adapting classic methodologies to a present context. However, each and every researcher dreams about being a pioneer in a subject one day, by discovering a topic that hasn’t been approached before by any other scientist. This is a research gap.
Research gaps are particularly useful for the advance of science in general. Finding a research gap and having the means to develop a complete and sustained study on it can be very rewarding for the scientist (or team of scientists) not to mention how its new findings can positively impact our whole society.
How to find a gap in research
How many times have you felt that you have finally formulated THAT new and exciting question, only to find out later that it had been addressed before? Probably more times than you can count.
There are some steps you can take to help identify research gaps since it is impossible to go through all the amount of information and research available nowadays:
- Select a topic or question that motivates you:
Research can take a long time and surely a large amount of physical, intellectual and emotional effort, therefore choose a topic that can keep you motivated throughout the process. - Find keywords and related terms to your selected topic:
Besides synthesizing the topic to its essential core, it will help you in the next step. - Use the identified keywords to search literature:
Identify relevant publications;
Identify cited literature present in the relevant publications marked in the step above. - Look for topics or issues that are missing or not addressed within (or related to) your main topic.
- Read systematic reviews:
These documents plunge deeply into scholarly literature and identify trends and paradigm shifts in fields of study. Sometimes they reveal areas or topics that need more attention from researchers and scientists.
To keep track of all the new literature being published every day is an impossible mission. Remember that there is technology to make your daily tasks easier and reviewing literature can be one of them. Some online databases offer up-to-date publication lists with quite effective search features:
- Elsevier’s Scope
- Google Scholar
- PubCrawler
- Feedly
Of course, these tools may be more or less effective depending on knowledge fields. There might be even better ones for your specific topic of research that you can know about from more experienced colleagues or mentors.
Literature gap
This expression “literature gap” is used just with the same intention as “research gap” for when there is a gap in the research itself, there will also naturally be a gap in the literature concerning it. Nevertheless, it is important to stress out the importance of language or text formulations that can help identify a research/literature gap or, on the other hand, making clear that a research gap is being addressed.
When looking for research gaps across publications you may have noticed sentences like:
…has/have not been… (studied/reported/elucidated)
…is required/needed…
…the key question is/remains…
…it is important to address…
These expressions often indicate gaps; issues or topics related to the main question that still hasn’t been subject to a scientific study. Therefore, it is important to take notice of them: who knows if one of these sentences is hiding your way to fame.
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