Four types of research gaps (with examples)

so one of the absolutely key issues that you need to get right in an introduction to a research paper is stating the research gap because if you don't state it properly even if you found it but if you don't state it properly it's very likely that your paper will be rejected and the reason for that is that reviewers are really looking for you know the novelty of your topic and the research gap allows you to highlight the novelty of that topic that's why in this video i'm going to show you four different ways with examples from four different fields of how you can present the research gap in your research paper so let's dive right in so to illustrate how important clarifying the research gap is for your paper let me give you a personal example recently i submitted a paper to one of the top journals in my field teaching english and the paper was not rejected but it came back with major corrections and one of the key issues that both reviewers pointed out was that they could not really see the novelty of your topic and i puzzled over this for you know for a couple of weeks really you know i looked at the comments and you know i wasn't really sure why and then it struck me that the way i presented the research gap just wasn't appropriate so in my mind it was completely clear why my research is novel and i'm sure it's completely clear to you because you're passionate about your topic and whatever you do on your topic you feel like it's novel but we need to present it properly in the introduction to the research paper as well so that's why in this video i'm going to show you four ways in which you can do this and present the research gap before we do that if you're new here my name is marek kitchikovak and i run academic english now where i help phd students and researchers regularly write research papers for high impact journals in their field so what are the four ways of presenting the research gap and how you can utilize it well the first one is really lack or insuffi lacrosse or insufficient research and this can be on a particular aspect of the topic this can also be to do with um you know with um geographical area that there haven't been enough studies in a particular location on a particular group of people on a particular material or so on but the basic premise is that there are just is it aren't insufficient studies or there is a lack of studies on that particular topic so with that said let me show you an example of this and how it is actually presented in research papers so let's look at um this paper from the field of food food functionality and let's see how the researcher presented the research gap um in here so we can clearly see the research gap just right at the very beginning here right and specifically this is um a gap in a in a topic that a specific aspect of the topic has not been um studied yet so processing intensity right has not really been studied right and then importantly the researcher also explains what has been done instead so far right and then they explain why this other aspect processing intensity should be studied right but in here you can basically see how um you know a lack of research on a specific topic or aspect of the topic and can be a research gap in how to present it right so you can use phrases like has not yet been included for example now the second thing that you can do to highlight the research gap is to talk about um a controversy or a lack of understanding in your field what do i mean by that well um in many fields a lot of research has already been done however despite this research we still don't know for example whether you know whether something actually works you know or the different studies have brought contradicting findings or the findings are not significant and therefore we we kind of still don't know what's going on so that's what i call the lack of clarity or a lack of understanding in your field or a controversy in your field and that's the second type of research gap so let's see with an example from a different field of how you can actually present it in your paper so you can also look at the research gap in terms of you know lack of clarity or lack of understanding in your field so let's look at a different example from a different field this paper is about weight loss right and let's see what the researcher did here and how they presented um the research gap right so let me highlight that for you but it's very easy to spot right so we've got little is known about right and then we also have it is not clear whether right and in here it was generally not possible to right so what we've got here is that you know previous researchers have done a lot of valuable work however things are still not clear there is a lack of understanding right and your study is going to clarify this lack of understanding right so that's another type of research gap that is commonly used and you can use phrases like little is known it is not clear to present this type of research gap in your paper now the third way in which you can present the research gap um in your paper is to point out the limitations of previous studies so each study no matter in which journal was published how good it was will always have some limitations you know to give you one example um in some fields um people tend to use a very small sample size right so even though they they might come to some conclusions you know that the sample size just limits um you know the how generalizable the findings of that study can be right and therefore we can point out these limitations in order to justify our study right so again let's look at a practical example let's see how this is actually done in a research paper so we can also talk about you know limitations of previous studies and use those as the research gap right so you know in here if we look at um this whole paragraph um first of all you know the the writer clearly states that there have only been four studies so first of all there is a clear lack of studies on this particular topic but more importantly you know this wouldn't be enough to justify this study more importantly you know the writer points out some limitations of those previous studies you know that they were conducted in just a specific context in the us or the uk right and another problem is that they are over a decade old right and you know another problem there's another study in here in a different context but it used a very small sample size right so that's a limitation of that previous research right and and also to further back it up in here we even have a quotation from a previous study right that shows that the limitations of previous studies and the problems with previous studies you know and this is used in order to justify the current study right so you can you you can talk about the limitations in order to give justification for your study because your study aims to solve these problems of previous studies now the fourth type of a research gap that you could also use to justify your study is sort of a real world problem that needs solving right so this is really good if you've got you know if you're writing on something that has practical implications and it's it's a problem that people out there in the real world are actually struggling with right and you know you can point out that you know for example um the way things are done at the moment maybe the away a certain mechanism works right it has has problems and it's just not working as it's supposed to be working and you're going to propose a solution to that particular problem right um so this is very nice for more practically oriented research topics and let's see how this is done on an example from um the field of physics now finally um this paper is from physics right and in here we're going to have a real world problem that needs solving and this is used as a research gap right um how can you do that well let me maybe make it slightly bigger for you right so you know they they talk about like production methods of different beams and things like that right stuff that physicists study right so you know this first method that is currently used is unpractical right and then we've got a justification why it's unpractical right right and then again it's iterated that it remains unpractical with respect to right um and then we've got another technique right but the beams produced with such techniques suffer from low production so we've got another kind of problem right so you can see that you know basically in here we've got a real world problem because physicists need to produce these beams right but the way they are currently produced is just not practical or it has problems so it's it's a real world problem that needs solving and this paper is going to propose a solution to solve this problem stronger so you don't have to limit yourself to just one type of a research gap right and as we saw in one of the examples that i that i showed you on the screen right you you can mix them up and say you know that there is a lack of studies in a particular topic and in addition to that some of those previous studies have certain limitations or maybe it is still not clear um you know what we should actually do right so definitely um you can you can mix them up but regardless of how you mix them up it is crucial that you present the research gap clearly before you state the research aim in your paper and if you do this properly this will really increase your chances of getting your paper published in top journals in your field so if you enjoyed this video don't forget to hit the like and the subscribe button so you don't miss any of future videos that i release on a weekly basis and if you want to work with me more personally to help you to regularly publish papers in top journals in your field and schedule a free one-to-one consultation calls with me or a member of my team but we're going to dive deeper into the challenges that you're facing with your research papers and we'll see how and if we can help you and then you know if it does send out that we can help you solve your problems and achieve your goals faster than we can talk further about how exactly we would work together and what our services would entail [Music]

Channel: Academic English Now

Views: 114,282

Keywords: research problem, problem statement, research gap, yt:cc=on

Id: ErbciX9Hr7Q

Length: 12min 32sec (752 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 06 2022