How I Find Research Gaps In Under 5 Minutes (Step-by-Step Tutorial & Strategies)

find the research Gap in 5 minutes or less it's going to be a tremendous video so much of your success as a researcher grad student Professor wherever you are in the journey depends on your ability to consistently repeatedly find winning research gaps I'm going to show you an efficient path to find these no matter what your field is in I can just hear my Italian colleagues but no you cannot find the research Gap in five minutes we're going to do it and I'm going to give you techniques to show you how and in doing that

by the end of this video you're also going to develop a nose for research gaps you're going to understand three different types of gaps that you can lift take and apply to your research right away so we're going to head here to Google Scholar which is your starting point for finding research gaps some of you might already know a bit about your field some of you may just be at the very beginning of the journey and this is going to be a a critical point now what you want to do in Google Scholar is yes

we want to type in our topic but we're going to change the settings so let me show you how so we'll take something topical on covid vaccine hesitancy and what you'll see is this is going to pull up some of the most highly cited articles in the field what you want to do is set the range you can see here at the top left you want recent gaps it's no good for you to identify a gap from the 1980s might be a seminal paper that's well and good but that Gap might already be filled so

we're going to set here a parameter to put in the last 2 3 years you want it to be recent and relevant that's also the reason why when we serve now when we get papers we don't want to just look at systematic reviews why because those papers are going to be reviewing papers that are older that may already be out of date looking at these reviews can be very helpful it can summarize gaps but first what I want you to do the fast way is go down and find articles on your topic so what I've

done here is I've scrolled down and I found one of the most highly cited ones on this page that is a research article published in a a nature Journal a good Journal so it's probably going to have some pretty good content for us to tap into so let's open that up and take a look some of you especially if you're new to the field you get a paper like this and are thinking man I don't understand anything is complex uh what do I do here you start reading the introduction and you start getting lost so

I want you to scrap all that I want you to hone in like a laser beam and go straight to the Gap go kind of straight to the meat of the paper for what you're looking for by the way we have great training on reading that's going to save you so much time um so check that out we put a link below but you're going to forensically go through here and look for gaps now where you going to find these gaps there are three main places in the paper where you'll find them we're trying to

do this fast so we're going to go straight to the end of the paper which is in the discussion where we talk about study limitations and that's right about there's often even going to be a sub heading here here we go study limitations well what are those study limitations going to do the paper's going to acknowledge its weaknesses and they're going to start pointing to either in this section or the one that just follows it future research so it's going to say we stopped short of doing this or this was a flaw in our paper

and this is a remaining Gap so uh let's take a look here and we can see if you look at this closely I'll try to zoom in here so it's a little bit bigger we can see what were the weaknesses of this paper and they give us Clues as to what could be some great gaps that we could tap so one here is is this this strikes me immediately as a really key Gap questions they did a survey with regard to they answer questions with regard to a hyp hypothetical vaccine well that could be very

different than if we're talking about people's experience with a real vaccine being available to them so this is an immediate Gap that you can Harvest and pluck take over to an Excel document or a Word document somewhere where you can keep track of these gaps because you may want to go do a quick harvesting and get tens 20s even hundreds of gaps that you can then prioritize on criteria of what's the fastest you can do what's feasible what's low hanging fruit I love low hanging fruit I I think as a professor the reason I've published

400 articles I got tener very quickly at Cambridge in my career is because I was able to identify lwh hanging fruits through this process that I'm sharing with now so that that would be one Gap here and uh let's look at others here's another one the current study H is really there's no secret sauce there's no magic here uh they tell you what the Gap is the current study was limited to two Western European countries okay well that's obviously a problem were interested in this topic then uh maybe those Western European countries really don't reflect

the experience of Eastern European countries countries in uh subsaharan Africa Latin America elsewhere in the world and they say already clear it's essential that we get this information from other countries that's a second Gap and this leads right into my point about different types of gaps this is an example of a population Gap hey we've studied in this population but not this other population that might be quite important for example example in Psychology many studies are done on a limited set of college students which may not reflect the real world so this is one type

of Gap called a population Gap other type of Gap that we saw up here you could think of um as a bit here we go um hypothetical vaccine you could uh think of this as a a type of empirical Gap that we looked at a hypothetical vaccine not a real vaccine so you could think of that as a methodological Gap that in their methods they just had look at hypothetical ones and uh not actual ones and that led to an empirical Gap or evidence Gap so we've got two broad kinds here a a population Gap

and a methological gap the other type is a conceptual Gap and I don't see that reflected in this paper Simplicity but it might be that they tested one Theory uh and not another theory and this new theory that maybe has a lot of light uh could could really get bring new insights that wouldn't be found otherwise okay and let's look at another Gap here and we've got another population Gap here that comes out finally they use uh nationally representative samples but that might not have reached difficult to reach populations homeless people in prisons or others

who might be very important to vaccinate so this is a strategy you can use right away so repeat that process Harvest lots of gaps now you can identify this very quickly there's a next step on these gaps because sometimes it can be hard for you to understand which of these gaps are the most important which is the most feasible that's where step number two strategy number two comes into place I want you to tap the value of your mentors I want you to have a mentor in the first place if you don't your supervisors colleagues

peers just bat these ideas by them hey I found this Gap in the literature and what do you think is this an important Gap can I do this in a short amount of time could could I develop this and publish this in a high impact Journal uh take advantage of those resources available to you I think sometimes students are a little bit scared about bothering their professors or their peers to ask questions no this is a critical time where you're investing in yourself so you need to make the most of this right away so don't

be scared to ask come with that running short list and you'll set yourself up for a very productive healthy and positive conversation with your colleagues then I want to come to a third approach that that you can use which we've had some great success with um and that is to take a more systematic approach yourself so if we come back here what you'll see is that the very first paper was a systematic review I recommend for almost many of you will know I'm I'm pretty much a systematic review evangelist I recommend these for almost anybody

who's struggling to find a research Gap because you're going to do a literature review but you're going to do that review on steroids in a publishable step-by-step way and an output of almost every systematic review is to set an agenda for future research if you'd like to learn more about systematic reviews we've got 100% free stepbystep playlist that takes you from from the very beginning to identifying your topic using some of the methods we're sharing here through to publishing and submitting to a peer reviewed Journal you're going to learn a ton that's going to strengthen

your skills as a researcher I wish I would have had this at when I was sitting where you are embarking on this journey and I want to come to our last secret tip this has just emerged only recently and use it kind of knowing the risks kind of disclaimers and caveats about it but we now have new emerging possibilities with artificial intelligence to find gaps I tested this with a student whom we had worked together to find a a gap and we just use artificial intelligence to see what it came up with and to our

surprise in a very short period of time it identified the Gap that we eventually went on to focus on in our research together so let me just show you quickly how you can apply this in your own work it's important here that you give a good prompt so say I'm a uh early career researcher looking for research gaps that are feasible to address in a short period of time and uh publish in high impact journals can you identify a series of gaps in research on covid vaccine hesitancy let's see what it comes up with so

indeed it's going to come up with a series of types of gaps uh misinformation this is a very nice Gap something we've worked on ourselves comparative studies across countries and you see this will give you ideas not all of them will be useful um but some of them can be quite helpful and you'll see this came up with different gaps than what we found on our own so I would use this as a complement to the gaps that you found the other thing you can do is pop your Gap into chat GPT to get feedback

on if this is a good gap for you to address so combine these two approaches very powerful and when you can get feedback from trusted mentors and colleagues if you can identify gaps routinely and regularly it's going to set you apart from your peers and your students and help you get on that proverbial Fast Track in your own academic and research career definitely like this video subscribe for more tips like these don't forget to join my exclusive Facebook group where we can chat directly and we have a lot of master classes weekly life workshops and

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