What is Research Gap?
A Research Gap is simply a part of an academic field that has not yet been thoroughly researched or is under-researched, and which may still be in the exploratory stage or may have a lot of room for improvement. Sometimes people ask, “What are Literature Review Gaps?” In reality, it’s about the fact that there is still a lot of room for in-depth research and exploration in the articles related to the research topic.
No matter what kind of Research Gap, there is a great emphasis on the spirit of innovation and the degree of in-depth, to make your tutor impressed with your article, you have to research Research Gap!
However, these Research Gaps are not easy to find because previous generations have already conducted a lot of research in the same area. Don’t worry, I’ll teach you how to find these Research Gaps cleverly!
D A method: Inverted Triangle Analysis.
First of all, define the background and research area you want to study, for example, if you want to study “the change of people’s behavioural patterns in the post-epidemic situation”, you need to collect a lot of relevant information. Then, you may find “educational shifts in behavioural patterns” interesting, which narrows down the scope of your research.
Education is a big topic, so you need to narrow it down further. Closer to home, you may find that “the advantages and disadvantages of online teaching” is a part that has been rarely studied, so you can focus your efforts here and complete the work of finding the Research Gap.
The second method: the intersection method.
In this method, you search by side-by-side comparisons. first, identify the field you want to research, such as sociology, management, psychology, etc. Then, search for research topics that are in the same area as the research topic in sociology, management, and psychology. Then, search for materials related to the research topic in the direction of sociology, for example, you may find 3,000; then look for management-related literature among these 3,000, and estimate that there are 1,000 left to be used; and assemble the 1,000 to find psychology-related concepts, and there may be only 20 left.
In this way, you can easily find the innovation and Research Gap you are looking for at the intersection of various fields.
The third method: the systematic analysis method.
This method is relatively complex and requires more time and effort. The so-called systematic analysis is to list all the relevant information you can find and filter out the interrelated parts. This ensures that the viewpoints are COMPLETELY, but because some two or three pieces of literature may be closely related to each other, there may be a large amount of overlapping content, which requires more time to carefully view and filter.
Tools like mind maps are also good options, although they can be a bit tedious to use.
