If you start with a narrow topic, you may struggle to find a gap in research, since you’ll be focused on fewer avenues of study. For instance, a broad topic for social sciences research might be “organizational development” or “human motivation. " For urban planning, a broad topic might be “walkable cities” or “traffic management. "
While you can’t include sources like Wikipedia and news websites on your literature review, it’s okay to read them to get an overview of your topic and recent developments in your field. It’s okay to narrow your topic as you learn more about it. However, keep your options open until you’re sure you’ve found an area with gaps in research. Let’s say you were researching human motivation. You might use search terms like “motivating workers,” “goal setting,” and “improving worker productivity. "
Your research needs to be very thorough to ensure that you’re actually finding a gap. If you only read a handful of articles, you may be missing other existing research that answers your proposed research question.
Ask them questions like, “Which areas of research are hot right now?” “What kinds of changes are happening within the field?” “What possible avenues of research do you see?” or “Do you think this topic is a good fit for me?”
If you decide an article is unhelpful, it’s okay to skip the second reading.
As an example, an author might identify their gap in research with a statement like: “This subject has not been previously studied,” or “This question remains unanswered. ”
If you keep your notes in a separate document, make sure you label them with the title of the article and the author’s name. This way you won’t accidentally get your notes mixed up.
Save any questions that you can’t answer because they may be a starting point for writing a research question.
For instance, you might make a research gap table in a spreadsheet. Create 3 columns and label them “Author,” “Year,” and “Summary. " For each article, list the authors, year of publication, and a bullet point summary of the article contents. Similarly, you may make a Venn diagram to compare 1 or more articles. Look for overlapping themes and methods, as well as differences between the articles.
Keep in mind that other researchers may have addressed the gaps identified in a particular article since that article was written. However, this can give you a starting point for finding a potential gap.
Don’t rely solely on these types of papers when conducting your research. However, they can make a great supplement.
Some journals will even tell you how many articles are pertaining to that key concept. If you see a key concept that has fewer articles than the others, that might be a good avenue for further research because it’s been studied less.
You can access Google trends here: https://trends. google. com/trends/?geo=US For instance, if you look up “organizational development” on Google trends, you’ll see that people are looking for information on management development, mission statements, and software framework.
