What makes your research necessary? How do you convince readers that your study contributes something meaningful to an already established body of scholarship? Hey, co-authors. One of the most challenging parts of academic writing is articulating the research gap. You might know your topic inside and out, have spent months reviewing the literature, and recognize that your study has something valuable to offer.
But translating that knowledge into a clear, persuasive argument for why your research matters, that's a different challenge. So let's dive in.
So about a week ago, I put on a workshop for the American Educational Research Association on writing. And
First off, I want to give a shout-out to the folks that were in that group. They were amazing. They asked really great questions about how to write, especially , as it comes to writing a literature review. And I'm excited for the research that they're doing 'cause it all sounds like they've got really great projects.
And I also wanna give a special shout-out to Kina Dordoni, who is the writing group chair and who was the one who invited me and is a listener of this podcast. So thanks Keena. Appreciate that and I really hope that I I get to check in with you all again and see how you all are doing on your dissertations.
And if anyone else, if you're interested in having me come speak to your group, to your class, to your graduate program, please reach out to me. I'm happy to talk with you about what that might look like. It can either be a one-off workshop or a project that I check in with you all over the course of a year. But either way it's always nice to see people who are just starting their craft of writing and really nerding out on their research with their dissertation projects.
So the talk was about telling a cohesive story through your dissertation's literature review. And a couple other questions that I got were about how to articulate a research gap.
And so I wanted to focus on that specifically because it seems like whenever I talk with early career writers, a lot of them think about a research gap as just being a matter of lack. And that's not the only way that a gap can be articulated or argued for.
And so I thought it might be helpful to talk about some of the ways that you could construct a research gap argument and how that in turn helps create a stronger cohesive narrative for your overall dissertation project. Okay, so let's dive in.
Are you interested in mastering scholarly writing, developing productivity, and increasing impact all while staying healthy? Then welcome to the Publishing Academic Research podcast. My name is Dr. Kyle Rudick, and I'm a full professor and writing coach who's dedicated to making sure you break through whatever is stopping you from reaching your scholarly goals. I meet so many scholars who have creative, innovative, and daring ideas but can never seem to get those projects from proposals to print. I want you to get your work in the hands of people who will read it and appreciate it. So let's get into this week's big idea.
So before I get into the specific indicators that I often see with folks that someone's not doing a good job arguing for their research gap. I wanna address sort of the overarching problem.
I think for so many early career writers, the advice that you are given is that you're supposed to read a whole bunch of stuff and then find out what's not in the literature, and then that's the research gap. And I mean, that's not bad advice. You're reading a whole bunch of stuff. You're trying to figure out then what hasn't been said, and then you are filling that space. And part of the argument that you're making is that your study is novel and therefore is justified in being conducted
When you look at research, even published research, you'll find that a lot of folks use phrases like few studies have examined, or no research has investigated, or little is known about. All of these phrases indicating to a reader that there is this gap in the literature based on a lack of studies in this area.
And in fact there was a study that came out just a couple of years ago, and granted, this is about, NIH biomedical research. But one of the things that the authors found, and this was Mylar and Battalo
in the Applied Linguistics Journal So in this study, they were looking at all of the different ways that academics sort of rhetorically make an argument for their work whenever they're doing NIH grant-funded research. And one of the things that they found in their corpus of work between 1985 and 2020 was a rise in the use of that type of gap language.
Little is known about, nothing is known about, right? Stuff like that. And one of the things that we might infer from that is that it is becoming increasingly common for academics to make an argument for a lack as the primary mechanism for justifying a research project being conducted, or in this case, funded by the NIH but there's a couple of problems with that. First is just the idea that little is known or nothing is known about this subject. I mean, it's possible, but honestly as things go forward, I think it's harder and harder to make that argument with a straight face.
50 years ago, whenever it was hard to find research, you might be able to credibly say, "Well, I looked in all the places that I could look and couldn't find anything about the subject that I'm researching." But nowadays, it's just really hard to make an argument there's little known or especially nothing is known about a subject more often what's happening there is that you just, you did not do a, a very thorough job of looking through the literature, or you did, but you didn't u-use the right terminology.
So there might be an entire corpus of work that's v-very closely related to what it is that you're doing, but because you didn't do a very good job of thinking about your search terms, you ended up not connecting with that body of literature. The other problem with it is, is that just because it hasn't been done doesn't necessarily mean that it's significant.
I can't tell you how many times whenever I'm talking with students whenever I'm teaching them research methods, and they think they've got this really cool idea, and they, they pitch it to me, and I'm just like, "Well, okay, cool.
So what?" Right? Like, " No one's studied this." " Okay, and?" Because oftentimes the things that might be immediately interesting to us , maybe they're not interesting because it's already settled. It's a question that's been addressed maybe twenty, thirty, forty years ago, or maybe it's just the practical implications of it just aren't that interesting for us.
And so simply the lack of something is not necessarily a guarantee that you have a justified study.
So what I would say overall is that it's important, obviously, to do the reading and establish what it is that we know about the subject. It's also important for you to establish what we don't know about the subject, right? What is unanswered or unexplored, maybe inadequately explained or conceptualized, or maybe has findings, whatever it might be.
But most importantly, it's going to be why it matters, ? And that third ingredient is often lacking whenever people solely rely on the lack of research in an area as being the primary justification for their study. So what are some indicators of this problem in people's writing?
So first off, I see folks that are not doing a good job of articulating their research gap, doing a lot of summarizing of the literature without establishing a problem. If I see a literature review and every paragraph is just one study, that's the most blatant example of this.
Every paragraph is a study. It's basically a stream of abstracts or of annotated bibliographies. It's just no one wants to read that, right? Because you're not building to anything. You're not synthesizing anything. You're just summarizing study after study. But even whenever you have multiple studies that appear in a paragraph or as you're building the entire section, what's important for you to do is for you to be building backwards from the gap into your literature.
And what I mean by that is, once you've done your reading and you for yourself have established what kind of research gap might exist, and maybe that's an empirical gap, right, a lack of studies, but there are other ones. It could be contradictory findings, right?
So studies are finding things that contradict one another. It could be that you have competing explanations for a phenomenon. It could be that you have a methodological gap, right? The way that it's been studied hasn't been rigorously done in the past.
Maybe it's conceptual, so the gap that you have here is about the precision of the definition. Right? There's a whole bunch of gaps that are out there that you could be looking at. And so once you have that gap, then the literature in your literature review is all about establishing that that gap exists.
So if I have a methodological gap, let's say, then whenever I'm writing my literature review, what I'm showing there is all of the studies. I'm not showing the studies because I'm interested necessarily in just understanding their findings and how those findings connect to my studies area. Instead, it's
we think that we know this stuff because these are the findings, but these are the methodological problems inherent in these types of studies. And as I look across the different studies, I see a repeated pattern of poor methodological choices that in turn casts doubt on what we thought we knew because of these methodological issues.
And so your job or your project is going to be to address that gap by providing a more rigorous methodological approach to whatever it is your phenomenon is. But the gap is dictating how your literature is being written and argued for throughout your literature review. You're not just summarizing different pieces.
All of that research is being done in service of your work, your gap
The second thing, and closely aligned with that, is that you identify a gap, but then your study doesn't actually address the research gap, ? So I had a piece that had been submitted one time whenever I was editing a journal.
And the people were like, " the research that's been done in this field has over-represented white and female participants, and so that is a huge problem. It's skewed all the results. It's done all these bad things. This is a huge problem.
This is a huge issue." And then you get to the methodology section, and their participants are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly female. And you're like, okay, you can't name it as a gap and then do nothing about it, right? Like that, that's not how that works. You would've been far better served by just running your study and then on the back end in your limitations saying, "Hey, our study is just as bad as a lot of the other studies that are out there over-representing the sample."
Instead, in the first half of your piece, you make it out to be that everyone else has done this moral and methodological harm, and then you engage in the exact same practice, ? So as you can imagine, that's not what we should be doing. So whenever you have a research gap, you need to address it. And again, there are a lot of different research gaps that are out there, and I would encourage you that if you're writing an article, probably only having one research gap.
If you're writing a dissertation or a book, maybe you can tackle more than that, two, three, four, whatever, right? But you really want to make sure that you are hewing closely to the type of problem that you're identifying. And if you think about this in terms of it being a story, right, the gap is the antagonist.
It's the bad guy here. You, as the writer, are the protagonist. You're the good guy. It's nice to be the good guy, right? And so if you say, "Hey, here's the dark lord who's screwing everything up trying to take over the world." That's a real problem, isn't it?
But instead, I'm gonna be focused on this other thing over here," right? Like, that doesn't work as a narrative. So if you have a bad guy, if you have an antagonist, if you have a research gap, you've got to be the one to address it, okay?
The last thing I will say and again, I know that I've kind of flogged this dead horse, but I think it just bears repeating, is that a lot of folks just over-focus on the lack of studies as a gap, ? There are other types of gaps that can be addressed.
Those can be unresolved contradictions, theoretical limitations, methodological weaknesses, conflicting studies, competing explanations, temporal issues, right? Like maybe something was true 40 years ago, but we found it to be not as true now.
Context changes, population changes. There's a million and one ways that you can argue for a gap other than just there hasn't been anything done here, ? So instead of thinking to yourself, "I need to look through the literature and find what hasn't been studied yet," instead, it's more important for you to ask, "Well, what does the existing literature tell us right now, and what does it also fail to explain or resolve or capture or challenge in the type of project that you're trying to articulate?"
So if you're in the process of trying to create a research gap argument for your dissertation or your article or whatever it might be, what might be some ways then to do a good job of articulating and arguing for a research gap?
Well, I think there's two things that you need to do in order to make sure that you are articulating a good research gap for your project. First, whenever you're doing your initial literature review, typically what I tell folks is that you need to go out and read 10 articles on the subject that you're wanting to study.
Now, you are gonna end up reading far more than 10 articles by the time that you're done. But 10 articles are gonna give you a good idea of the lay of the land. And through that initial reading, you can start to develop your initial research gap argument.
This might not be the most precise research gap argument. As you continue to do your reading, you might find little refinements. But what you are not probably going to do is have to chuck it out. The only time that you have to completely chuck out a research gap argument is if you say, " There's nothing that's been done on this before," and then halfway through your dissertation, someone publishes something, and it's the exact thing that you were trying to do with your dissertation.
And then, my friends, as the kids say, you are cooked because you said that there wasn't anything on this, and now there's something on it. So it's just a dangerous argument to make to say that there's nothing on this. So don't overstate your case. You can talk about there being little research on the topic or as we've been talking about, maybe that's not even the gap. Maybe it's methodological, maybe it's conceptual, maybe it's practical. There's a lot of different ways that one can make a gap argument.
But after you read those initial ten articles, now you've got a good idea of where the gap might be. I've read ten things, and I've noticed everything is cross-sectional survey research. Okay, my dissertation, my project, my whatever is going to be an experimental design. So the gap is this poor research design.
My answer to that is going to be this methodological choice. Or maybe it's I've looked through all this stuff and after reading these ten articles or these ten studies or whatever books or whatever it might be, I found that they used this word, but everyone was using a slightly different definition.
There's not a universal definition, and that slippage is causing all sorts of downstream issues in terms of implications for theory and practice. Now you've got a conceptual gap. That's where you're gonna be putting your effort into. So those first ten studies helps you establish the existing knowledge that's already on this subject.
And I would even encourage you to write out maybe a paragraph where you establish what's the existing knowledge that you know about this thing so far. So that's paragraph one, okay. Paragraph two is now specify what remains unresolved.
What's the limitation, what's unanswered? What's the contradiction? What's the missing perspective? What is it that isn't there or is there but is not helpful to what it is that you're trying to get at through your project? ? Again, write a paragraph on this.
Write through those ten studies and demonstrate to yourself what it is that's unresolved. Not necessarily missing, not necessarily lacking, but unresolved in the literature. Third thing, now explain the significance of it. Why does it matter that we don't know this thing? Is it a matter of aiding our theoretical knowledge on this particular issue?
Is it about the practical knowledge about intervention into some sort of practice?
Is it about being able to do research in a more effective or efficient way through a new methodological approach? What is it that makes your work worthwhile to read? Again, write this in a paragraph. So now you have three paragraphs that are telling you what we know, what's unresolved, and why it matters.
And now, as you're writing through your literature review, you can always reference this document as a way of helping you make sure that you have in your head that everything that you are writing is addressing this research gap, culminating into the next solution, which is making sure that the gap and your research question or your hypothesis or your research purpose are working together, ?
Because ultimately, those things are what you are forwarding in your study as a way of addressing the research gap. So you need to make sure that the method that you're employing can produce the type of evidence that you need order to address whatever the research gap is.
So if you're citing a methodological issue on population, and then your study replicates that exact same problem, then your research purpose and your research question are not really addressing the gap, okay?
So as you're writing your literature review, now you're branching out beyond those 10 studies, and you're pulling on a whole bunch of new stuff, and you should be checking editing, and revising that research gap argument against the new stuff that you're reading. It could be that the gap that you had ends up not being the gap that you are left with because you find studies or something that's very similar that helps answer the things that you were trying to get at, in which case then, okay, now the gap that I have, it might be resolved, but that's probably opened up new unresolved gaps.
Or it could be that, you know, as you're reading through that literature, all you're finding is further reinforcement of your initial research gap that you argued. Awesome. Great. That means less work for you. And so, as you're going through this, it's perfectly okay for you to revise your research gap and to revise your hypothesis, research question, or your research purpose, ?
Because at this point, you're in the literature review stage, and all you're doing is constructing an argument as to why your study needs to be conducted.
Overall, what I would say is that it's important that whenever you are developing a research gap, that it's not just a declaration that something is missing. That a research gap can be a lack of research, but that's not necessarily the only way that a research gap can be argued for.
And so making sure that you're doing a good job of doing that initial read of the literature will help you understand what type of gap it is that you should be arguing for, and then from there, you just work backwards. Everything that you read is now in service of you building, extending, warranting, revising, or maybe even throwing away that research gap for your project
And I think that if you approach the research gap under this with this idea that the gap is the antagonist, you are the protagonist, your literature review, and in fact, your entire study is a story, and your job as the white knight who's come to save us all is to address the dark lord antagonist so that way we can all live happily ever after, right?
I think as silly as that might sound, especially for the more hard-headed scientific or social scientific folks out there I think that it's just a good way of reminding yourself that just because something is not done doesn't make it worth studying. It's only whenever that gap is meaningful for us that it turns into an antagonist, and then our work and our story becomes meaningful to our readers.
Okay? So I think that's gonna about wrap it up for me, folks. As always, I appreciate you listening.
I hope you're starting your marathons of watching very spooky movies. My partner and I recently saw the new Resident Evil movie, and I've gotta say, as a longtime nerd and video game player of the Resident Evil games, I dug it, man. It was pretty good. So I hope you're out there having some fun, taking some time to... have some spooktacular thrills
I know that October is always busy for all of us, but it's always nice to take a night off, go see a movie, go out to eat, go to the gym, take a walk, whatever it is that you find to be fun and relaxing, make sure that you do that because folks, I mean, the writing will never go away.
But
You'll never get your writing done if all you do is write, because at some point in time, you're just putting things out into the world and you're not taking anything in, and it's important for you to recharge your batteries. ? On the note of recharging, if you feel like you need someone to talk to as you're working through a project or an idea or anything else, feel free to reach out to me.
You know, my coaching services are always available. First meeting that you have with me is always free. And again, if you're interested in me doing a workshop with your department or conference or anything else, my contact information's in the description.
Happy to talk with you about that. Okay? Until then, thanks for listening, and I will see you in next week's episode.
Hey, co-authors. What's stopping your best ideas from becoming your next big publication? Brilliant research shouldn't die in your drafts folder. Now's the time to bridge the gap between the possible and the published. You can support this podcast by subscribing to it, leaving a positive review, assigning it to your classes, or sharing it with a colleague. Let me know what I can do to make this the best podcast resource for you. And if you'd like to know more about my writing coach services, then you can find my information in the podcast description and set up an appointment. I'll be back next week with another episode, but until then, keep healthy, keep writing, and don't let Reviewer 2 get you down.
But translating that knowledge into a clear, persuasive argument for why your research matters, that's a different challenge. So let's dive in.
So about a week ago, I put on a workshop for the American Educational Research Association on writing. And
First off, I want to give a shout-out to the folks that were in that group. They were amazing. They asked really great questions about how to write, especially , as it comes to writing a literature review. And I'm excited for the research that they're doing 'cause it all sounds like they've got really great projects.
And I also wanna give a special shout-out to Kina Dordoni, who is the writing group chair and who was the one who invited me and is a listener of this podcast. So thanks Keena. Appreciate that and I really hope that I I get to check in with you all again and see how you all are doing on your dissertations.
And if anyone else, if you're interested in having me come speak to your group, to your class, to your graduate program, please reach out to me. I'm happy to talk with you about what that might look like. It can either be a one-off workshop or a project that I check in with you all over the course of a year. But either way it's always nice to see people who are just starting their craft of writing and really nerding out on their research with their dissertation projects.
So the talk was about telling a cohesive story through your dissertation's literature review. And a couple other questions that I got were about how to articulate a research gap.
And so I wanted to focus on that specifically because it seems like whenever I talk with early career writers, a lot of them think about a research gap as just being a matter of lack. And that's not the only way that a gap can be articulated or argued for.
And so I thought it might be helpful to talk about some of the ways that you could construct a research gap argument and how that in turn helps create a stronger cohesive narrative for your overall dissertation project. Okay, so let's dive in.
Are you interested in mastering scholarly writing, developing productivity, and increasing impact all while staying healthy? Then welcome to the Publishing Academic Research podcast. My name is Dr. Kyle Rudick, and I'm a full professor and writing coach who's dedicated to making sure you break through whatever is stopping you from reaching your scholarly goals. I meet so many scholars who have creative, innovative, and daring ideas but can never seem to get those projects from proposals to print. I want you to get your work in the hands of people who will read it and appreciate it. So let's get into this week's big idea.
So before I get into the specific indicators that I often see with folks that someone's not doing a good job arguing for their research gap. I wanna address sort of the overarching problem.
I think for so many early career writers, the advice that you are given is that you're supposed to read a whole bunch of stuff and then find out what's not in the literature, and then that's the research gap. And I mean, that's not bad advice. You're reading a whole bunch of stuff. You're trying to figure out then what hasn't been said, and then you are filling that space. And part of the argument that you're making is that your study is novel and therefore is justified in being conducted
When you look at research, even published research, you'll find that a lot of folks use phrases like few studies have examined, or no research has investigated, or little is known about. All of these phrases indicating to a reader that there is this gap in the literature based on a lack of studies in this area.
And in fact there was a study that came out just a couple of years ago, and granted, this is about, NIH biomedical research. But one of the things that the authors found, and this was Mylar and Battalo
in the Applied Linguistics Journal So in this study, they were looking at all of the different ways that academics sort of rhetorically make an argument for their work whenever they're doing NIH grant-funded research. And one of the things that they found in their corpus of work between 1985 and 2020 was a rise in the use of that type of gap language.
Little is known about, nothing is known about, right? Stuff like that. And one of the things that we might infer from that is that it is becoming increasingly common for academics to make an argument for a lack as the primary mechanism for justifying a research project being conducted, or in this case, funded by the NIH but there's a couple of problems with that. First is just the idea that little is known or nothing is known about this subject. I mean, it's possible, but honestly as things go forward, I think it's harder and harder to make that argument with a straight face.
50 years ago, whenever it was hard to find research, you might be able to credibly say, "Well, I looked in all the places that I could look and couldn't find anything about the subject that I'm researching." But nowadays, it's just really hard to make an argument there's little known or especially nothing is known about a subject more often what's happening there is that you just, you did not do a, a very thorough job of looking through the literature, or you did, but you didn't u-use the right terminology.
So there might be an entire corpus of work that's v-very closely related to what it is that you're doing, but because you didn't do a very good job of thinking about your search terms, you ended up not connecting with that body of literature. The other problem with it is, is that just because it hasn't been done doesn't necessarily mean that it's significant.
I can't tell you how many times whenever I'm talking with students whenever I'm teaching them research methods, and they think they've got this really cool idea, and they, they pitch it to me, and I'm just like, "Well, okay, cool.
So what?" Right? Like, " No one's studied this." " Okay, and?" Because oftentimes the things that might be immediately interesting to us , maybe they're not interesting because it's already settled. It's a question that's been addressed maybe twenty, thirty, forty years ago, or maybe it's just the practical implications of it just aren't that interesting for us.
And so simply the lack of something is not necessarily a guarantee that you have a justified study.
So what I would say overall is that it's important, obviously, to do the reading and establish what it is that we know about the subject. It's also important for you to establish what we don't know about the subject, right? What is unanswered or unexplored, maybe inadequately explained or conceptualized, or maybe has findings, whatever it might be.
But most importantly, it's going to be why it matters, ? And that third ingredient is often lacking whenever people solely rely on the lack of research in an area as being the primary justification for their study. So what are some indicators of this problem in people's writing?
So first off, I see folks that are not doing a good job of articulating their research gap, doing a lot of summarizing of the literature without establishing a problem. If I see a literature review and every paragraph is just one study, that's the most blatant example of this.
Every paragraph is a study. It's basically a stream of abstracts or of annotated bibliographies. It's just no one wants to read that, right? Because you're not building to anything. You're not synthesizing anything. You're just summarizing study after study. But even whenever you have multiple studies that appear in a paragraph or as you're building the entire section, what's important for you to do is for you to be building backwards from the gap into your literature.
And what I mean by that is, once you've done your reading and you for yourself have established what kind of research gap might exist, and maybe that's an empirical gap, right, a lack of studies, but there are other ones. It could be contradictory findings, right?
So studies are finding things that contradict one another. It could be that you have competing explanations for a phenomenon. It could be that you have a methodological gap, right? The way that it's been studied hasn't been rigorously done in the past.
Maybe it's conceptual, so the gap that you have here is about the precision of the definition. Right? There's a whole bunch of gaps that are out there that you could be looking at. And so once you have that gap, then the literature in your literature review is all about establishing that that gap exists.
So if I have a methodological gap, let's say, then whenever I'm writing my literature review, what I'm showing there is all of the studies. I'm not showing the studies because I'm interested necessarily in just understanding their findings and how those findings connect to my studies area. Instead, it's
we think that we know this stuff because these are the findings, but these are the methodological problems inherent in these types of studies. And as I look across the different studies, I see a repeated pattern of poor methodological choices that in turn casts doubt on what we thought we knew because of these methodological issues.
And so your job or your project is going to be to address that gap by providing a more rigorous methodological approach to whatever it is your phenomenon is. But the gap is dictating how your literature is being written and argued for throughout your literature review. You're not just summarizing different pieces.
All of that research is being done in service of your work, your gap
The second thing, and closely aligned with that, is that you identify a gap, but then your study doesn't actually address the research gap, ? So I had a piece that had been submitted one time whenever I was editing a journal.
And the people were like, " the research that's been done in this field has over-represented white and female participants, and so that is a huge problem. It's skewed all the results. It's done all these bad things. This is a huge problem.
This is a huge issue." And then you get to the methodology section, and their participants are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly female. And you're like, okay, you can't name it as a gap and then do nothing about it, right? Like that, that's not how that works. You would've been far better served by just running your study and then on the back end in your limitations saying, "Hey, our study is just as bad as a lot of the other studies that are out there over-representing the sample."
Instead, in the first half of your piece, you make it out to be that everyone else has done this moral and methodological harm, and then you engage in the exact same practice, ? So as you can imagine, that's not what we should be doing. So whenever you have a research gap, you need to address it. And again, there are a lot of different research gaps that are out there, and I would encourage you that if you're writing an article, probably only having one research gap.
If you're writing a dissertation or a book, maybe you can tackle more than that, two, three, four, whatever, right? But you really want to make sure that you are hewing closely to the type of problem that you're identifying. And if you think about this in terms of it being a story, right, the gap is the antagonist.
It's the bad guy here. You, as the writer, are the protagonist. You're the good guy. It's nice to be the good guy, right? And so if you say, "Hey, here's the dark lord who's screwing everything up trying to take over the world." That's a real problem, isn't it?
But instead, I'm gonna be focused on this other thing over here," right? Like, that doesn't work as a narrative. So if you have a bad guy, if you have an antagonist, if you have a research gap, you've got to be the one to address it, okay?
The last thing I will say and again, I know that I've kind of flogged this dead horse, but I think it just bears repeating, is that a lot of folks just over-focus on the lack of studies as a gap, ? There are other types of gaps that can be addressed.
Those can be unresolved contradictions, theoretical limitations, methodological weaknesses, conflicting studies, competing explanations, temporal issues, right? Like maybe something was true 40 years ago, but we found it to be not as true now.
Context changes, population changes. There's a million and one ways that you can argue for a gap other than just there hasn't been anything done here, ? So instead of thinking to yourself, "I need to look through the literature and find what hasn't been studied yet," instead, it's more important for you to ask, "Well, what does the existing literature tell us right now, and what does it also fail to explain or resolve or capture or challenge in the type of project that you're trying to articulate?"
So if you're in the process of trying to create a research gap argument for your dissertation or your article or whatever it might be, what might be some ways then to do a good job of articulating and arguing for a research gap?
Well, I think there's two things that you need to do in order to make sure that you are articulating a good research gap for your project. First, whenever you're doing your initial literature review, typically what I tell folks is that you need to go out and read 10 articles on the subject that you're wanting to study.
Now, you are gonna end up reading far more than 10 articles by the time that you're done. But 10 articles are gonna give you a good idea of the lay of the land. And through that initial reading, you can start to develop your initial research gap argument.
This might not be the most precise research gap argument. As you continue to do your reading, you might find little refinements. But what you are not probably going to do is have to chuck it out. The only time that you have to completely chuck out a research gap argument is if you say, " There's nothing that's been done on this before," and then halfway through your dissertation, someone publishes something, and it's the exact thing that you were trying to do with your dissertation.
And then, my friends, as the kids say, you are cooked because you said that there wasn't anything on this, and now there's something on it. So it's just a dangerous argument to make to say that there's nothing on this. So don't overstate your case. You can talk about there being little research on the topic or as we've been talking about, maybe that's not even the gap. Maybe it's methodological, maybe it's conceptual, maybe it's practical. There's a lot of different ways that one can make a gap argument.
But after you read those initial ten articles, now you've got a good idea of where the gap might be. I've read ten things, and I've noticed everything is cross-sectional survey research. Okay, my dissertation, my project, my whatever is going to be an experimental design. So the gap is this poor research design.
My answer to that is going to be this methodological choice. Or maybe it's I've looked through all this stuff and after reading these ten articles or these ten studies or whatever books or whatever it might be, I found that they used this word, but everyone was using a slightly different definition.
There's not a universal definition, and that slippage is causing all sorts of downstream issues in terms of implications for theory and practice. Now you've got a conceptual gap. That's where you're gonna be putting your effort into. So those first ten studies helps you establish the existing knowledge that's already on this subject.
And I would even encourage you to write out maybe a paragraph where you establish what's the existing knowledge that you know about this thing so far. So that's paragraph one, okay. Paragraph two is now specify what remains unresolved.
What's the limitation, what's unanswered? What's the contradiction? What's the missing perspective? What is it that isn't there or is there but is not helpful to what it is that you're trying to get at through your project? ? Again, write a paragraph on this.
Write through those ten studies and demonstrate to yourself what it is that's unresolved. Not necessarily missing, not necessarily lacking, but unresolved in the literature. Third thing, now explain the significance of it. Why does it matter that we don't know this thing? Is it a matter of aiding our theoretical knowledge on this particular issue?
Is it about the practical knowledge about intervention into some sort of practice?
Is it about being able to do research in a more effective or efficient way through a new methodological approach? What is it that makes your work worthwhile to read? Again, write this in a paragraph. So now you have three paragraphs that are telling you what we know, what's unresolved, and why it matters.
And now, as you're writing through your literature review, you can always reference this document as a way of helping you make sure that you have in your head that everything that you are writing is addressing this research gap, culminating into the next solution, which is making sure that the gap and your research question or your hypothesis or your research purpose are working together, ?
Because ultimately, those things are what you are forwarding in your study as a way of addressing the research gap. So you need to make sure that the method that you're employing can produce the type of evidence that you need order to address whatever the research gap is.
So if you're citing a methodological issue on population, and then your study replicates that exact same problem, then your research purpose and your research question are not really addressing the gap, okay?
So as you're writing your literature review, now you're branching out beyond those 10 studies, and you're pulling on a whole bunch of new stuff, and you should be checking editing, and revising that research gap argument against the new stuff that you're reading. It could be that the gap that you had ends up not being the gap that you are left with because you find studies or something that's very similar that helps answer the things that you were trying to get at, in which case then, okay, now the gap that I have, it might be resolved, but that's probably opened up new unresolved gaps.
Or it could be that, you know, as you're reading through that literature, all you're finding is further reinforcement of your initial research gap that you argued. Awesome. Great. That means less work for you. And so, as you're going through this, it's perfectly okay for you to revise your research gap and to revise your hypothesis, research question, or your research purpose, ?
Because at this point, you're in the literature review stage, and all you're doing is constructing an argument as to why your study needs to be conducted.
Overall, what I would say is that it's important that whenever you are developing a research gap, that it's not just a declaration that something is missing. That a research gap can be a lack of research, but that's not necessarily the only way that a research gap can be argued for.
And so making sure that you're doing a good job of doing that initial read of the literature will help you understand what type of gap it is that you should be arguing for, and then from there, you just work backwards. Everything that you read is now in service of you building, extending, warranting, revising, or maybe even throwing away that research gap for your project
And I think that if you approach the research gap under this with this idea that the gap is the antagonist, you are the protagonist, your literature review, and in fact, your entire study is a story, and your job as the white knight who's come to save us all is to address the dark lord antagonist so that way we can all live happily ever after, right?
I think as silly as that might sound, especially for the more hard-headed scientific or social scientific folks out there I think that it's just a good way of reminding yourself that just because something is not done doesn't make it worth studying. It's only whenever that gap is meaningful for us that it turns into an antagonist, and then our work and our story becomes meaningful to our readers.
Okay? So I think that's gonna about wrap it up for me, folks. As always, I appreciate you listening.
I hope you're starting your marathons of watching very spooky movies. My partner and I recently saw the new Resident Evil movie, and I've gotta say, as a longtime nerd and video game player of the Resident Evil games, I dug it, man. It was pretty good. So I hope you're out there having some fun, taking some time to... have some spooktacular thrills
I know that October is always busy for all of us, but it's always nice to take a night off, go see a movie, go out to eat, go to the gym, take a walk, whatever it is that you find to be fun and relaxing, make sure that you do that because folks, I mean, the writing will never go away.
But
You'll never get your writing done if all you do is write, because at some point in time, you're just putting things out into the world and you're not taking anything in, and it's important for you to recharge your batteries. ? On the note of recharging, if you feel like you need someone to talk to as you're working through a project or an idea or anything else, feel free to reach out to me.
You know, my coaching services are always available. First meeting that you have with me is always free. And again, if you're interested in me doing a workshop with your department or conference or anything else, my contact information's in the description.
Happy to talk with you about that. Okay? Until then, thanks for listening, and I will see you in next week's episode.
Hey, co-authors. What's stopping your best ideas from becoming your next big publication? Brilliant research shouldn't die in your drafts folder. Now's the time to bridge the gap between the possible and the published. You can support this podcast by subscribing to it, leaving a positive review, assigning it to your classes, or sharing it with a colleague. Let me know what I can do to make this the best podcast resource for you. And if you'd like to know more about my writing coach services, then you can find my information in the podcast description and set up an appointment. I'll be back next week with another episode, but until then, keep healthy, keep writing, and don't let Reviewer 2 get you down.
