How to identify a research gap EASILY [Sanity-saving tools]

finding a research gap is so important it is the first step towards doing something new novel and interesting and contributing knowledge to a particular field and the first way i like to find research gaps and get a flavor for what's bubbling underneath the surface in the research environment is to look at the concluding remarks of recent papers recent papers will often have uh comments along the lines of you know the limitations of this work or future work will involve and that isn't a research gap necessarily but it tells you where the research is heading and

from there it can go any number of directions looking at research groups recent non-peer-reviewed outputs as well is fantastic conference presentations any theses that have been published anything like that that is sort of like um presented but not submitted will tell you where the real edge of that research is and then it's about finding your very own little gap within that research it can be very very daunting very challenging to try to find where your niche lies but in this video i'm going to share with you the tools that i use and one of them

is so very very simple that anyone can find a research gap i could find 10 right now i'm not boasting it is so easy to find them it's just about trying to make sure that you're in the right area and that your research gap is big enough or small enough to sort of satisfy the requirements of a phd of a masters whatever it is and that is really where uh speaking to an expert can really help okay let's get into it this video is brought to you by my newsletter go check it out at andrew

stapleton dot com dot a u four slash newsletter the link is in the description when you sign up you'll get five emails over about two weeks everything from how to write the perfect abstract the tools i use my tedx talk the podcast i've been on and more is exclusive content available for free so go sign up now i can't believe how simple it is these days to actually find research gaps or the front edge of research so then you can take it in any direction you want now the thing is is that google scholar is

a fantastic tool and scientists use very specific phrases when they want to kind of present data but they're not kind of put in their full uh reputation behind it it's so simple that all we have to do is head over to google scholar and type in these phrases promising results or preliminary results put those in quotation marks because we are looking exactly for those types of phrases and then you can put a capital and and then the area that you want to go into so let's take a look over here hello i'm on this camera

now um all we have to do is i've already typed in promising results and solar cell because that was where i was and i've said that i want it since 2022 which is this year and you can see we have got tons of different types of options for where promising results have been made and importantly that is where we can find research gaps a lot of the time when there's promising or preliminary results you will often be faced with a challenge to overcome the limitations of that study so that is a perfect place to launch

your career your research gap sort of question that is really the simplest way that i can think of to find research gaps now importantly this is not the end of the story you do have to read more and more research around that sort of particular gap to make sure it is a genuine gap and not just a false one where a particular research group has kind of uh you know gone down a little bit of a path but the path is a dead end so these techniques will absolutely show you the best kind of areas

to start investigating but really it comes down to reading around that subject and you'll start seeing sort of things pop up common uh themes common questions common gaps common areas and that's when you can kind of start to really sort of focus in on a research gap for your studies the third way and probably the easiest way to find a research gap is to ask a current researcher phd student postdoc or supervisor about the current challenges in their work now you can't just walk up to them and be like oh so what's a good research

gap that's not kind of the question that we ask ourselves as researchers and it certainly wasn't a way that i interacted with my fellow researchers it was all about the current challenges i'm having so a lot of people will be very happy to tell you about their research and then a leading question into finding a research gap is to say well what current challenges do you have with your research and also supervisors ones that have phd students and masters students are always thinking about that next kind of topic that next research area for a master's

student student that next area for a grant all of those things are just constantly bubbling at the surface of their mind and all you have to do is ask the right questions and they'll happily tell you because really the hard work in science is answering those questions coming up with ideas is surprisingly easy once you know uh the research field and you've got a sense of uh where people are struggling where the research is going and also what your unique contribution can be to that research area which is another very important but sometimes overlooked point

there are also online tools that can help you such as connected papers research rabbit and lip maps those are fantastic tools to actually have a look to see how all of the literature in a particular field are connected they create a nice little web and looking at that web you may notice that a load of different kind of papers point to one area and then it goes nowhere that's a great opportunity for you to say well why did that go nowhere was there a particular challenge that uh needed to be overcome or was it genuinely

a dead end now the only way to answer that is to read a lot around that potential research knowledge gap and then use your own skills to see if you can come up with a way to uh test whether or not it was a dead end or whether or not it's something that can be overcome it is a lot of reading no doubt but these tools can certainly help you find a research gap another way that you can find a research gap is by looking at conflicting ideas any conflicting ideas that are hotly contested be

a fantastic area for you to jump into if you can bring a new angle a new skill a new idea to an area where there's a lot of conflict that may be a fantastic research gap there are lots of opportunities where scientists and researchers are kind of arguing over a particular idea you may be able to bring that little something to help push the field in one direction or another if that isn't a novel and important contribution to a field i don't know what is so look out for where people disagree the most it may

be your biggest opportunity so there we have it there's everything you need to know about identifying a research gap after i've been talking about it we're not looking for a bubble we're not looking for an area in the middle of research that needs to be filled we are talking about the leading edge of research and the directions that you can take that research no that's not to say there isn't a bubble out there to be found but i think they're getting rarer and rarer what we need to think about is the leading edge of the

research and the potential ways that that research could go and how we could fill that little gap or how we could take a research in a particular direction that would help benefit the field i think that's what we mean by research gap stop looking for the holes start looking for the tendrils coming out the outside of our known uh world i guess so let me know in the comments what you would add and do you agree with me what other tools do you use for finding research gaps i'd love to know and also go check

out academiainsider.com that's my project where i've got my two ebooks the ultimate academic writing toolkit as well as the phd survival guide and i'll see you in the next video