3 easy ways to identify the research gap

Many university students or researchers often ask me about the research gap or the statement of problem ,and how to identify it. And this is super, super important, because if there is no problem, if you don't have a research gap, then you basically don't have an aim of your paper, and this means you don't really have a thesis or a paper. So identifying the research gap or the problem is vital.

That's why in this video I want to share with you my three top tips to very quickly identifying the research gap, from which then you can have the aim of your study and the rest of your thesis. So let's get started! If you're new here, my name is Marek Kiczkowiak, and I run academicenglishnow.

com, where I help university students and researchers write better theses and papers. f you're enjoying this video, then please hit the like button and also consider subscribing and hitting that bell button so you receive my future videos, and you can continue improving your academic writing together with me on this channel. So the first tip that I want to share with you to help you identify the research gap is to look for a lack of studies or for insufficient studies.

Now, it's very unlikely that no studies have been conducted on something. It might be the case, but it's rather unlikely. But what is likely is that there is not enough studies.

In other words, there is an insufficient number of studies on a particular topic or perhaps in a particular area. So in here, when it comes to the lack of studies, you can consider several gaps in knowledge, for example. It can be a geographical gap (maybe no studies on this subject have been conducted in Latin America or Southeast Asia, or a particular region of your country).

You could also think about the population gap - maybe most people have studied men, and very few people have studied this topic on women, or on children, or on high income people, low income people, educated people, and so on. So this is just to give you a couple of examples how you can look for a lack or insufficient research in order to identify the research gap. Tip number two would be to look for not a lack of studies, but a lack of understanding or a lack of knowledge, or some kind of controversy in your field.

Now, it very often happens that if several studies have already been conducted on a particular issue, they might have had different results, and this means that we are not sure yet how we should understand this problem. There might also be conflicting theories, or there might be different explanations for a particular phenomenon. In other words, researchers disagree for example as to the cause of something or the effect of something, or there are different ways of approaching a particular problem.

This would be another way in which you can identify the research gap or the problem that will then lead you to the aim of your study. Now before we finish, I just wanted to quickly encourage you to join my five-day Instant Better Academic Writing challenge, which in just 10 minutes for the next five days will really help you improve your academic writing. And the link to this challenge is right below this video.

Now, the last and third tip that I want to talk about is to look for problems in previous studies, to look for limitations of previous research, to look for things that other researchers have not done 100 percent well, things that could be improved about their studies; and this can also give you your research gap or the statement of problem. For example, think about it like this: perhaps most researchers have used a particular way of analyzing the data, but they ignored other ways in which that data could be analyzed, which potentially could have given different results. Now to sum up, the three ways in which you can identify the research gap and state the problem which you're going to answer with your research aim.

First of all, to look for a lack of research or insufficient research. Number two: look for lack of understanding or a controversy in your field. And number three is to look for limitations of previous studies or problems with previous studies.

If possible, you should have more than one problem, more than one research gap that you're going to identify, usually, especially if you're doing a PhD, it won't be enough just to have one, just to say insufficient studies have been conducted and that's it, as a result I'm going to do another study. That's not enough. If possible as well, have different types of research gaps, so maybe have one about insufficient studies and another one maybe about a lack of understanding or a problem with previous studies.

This will help make the reason for your study, this problem or research gap, much more robust and stronger, and as a result, the aim of your study will be much more logical as well. If you enjoyed this video, then please consider subscribing to this channel and hit that bell button so you don't miss any of my future videos. And don't forget to join the 5 day academic writing challenge: the link is right below this video.