💪 How to Identify Research Gaps and Highlight Research Contributions: A Step-by-step Guide

in this video based on my experience of supervising research students in various fields and also as an editor who makes decision on more than 1,000 submitted manuscripts to my journal every year I will share my step-by-step guide on how to identify research gaps and how to highlight them in your research work research paper or thesis your research should make a novel contribution to the field by addressing a research Gap in the literature in other words your research should answer a research question that has not been addressed previously identifying a research Gap is essentially to justify

conducting your research in this video I will provide a detailed guide on how to do this generally there are three types of research gaps in academic research which can be in the form of a thesis paper or research project I have named them as lack of clarity lack of generalizability and methodological limitations I will review these three types and provide three examples for each before we proceed please support me by giving a like to this video and leave a comment below you're engagement helps this video reach more people and also motivates me to make more

content like this for you in the future thank you very much for your support the main three form of research to address lack of clarity could be testing new theories developing and testing integrated and extended theories and new models as well as addressing mixed and contradictory results the first form of lack of clarity is testing new theories one of the most common research gaps is what little is known about a concept or relationship in other words there is a lack of empirical evidence to answer research question for examp example you may conduct an empirical study

to test a theory that has not been tested much there might be a large body of research to explain a concept or relationships between some variables using some specific theories and you may use a new Theory to explain the relationships this would help us look at the relationships from another perspective and improve our understanding in this regard for example there are numerous studies on the relationship between corporate governance and Company's performance using agency theory you could examine and explain these relation ship using another theory like the resource dependence Theory which has not been extensively used

in the past the second form of lack of clarity is developing and testing a research model that you have developed for example you could integrate two or three theories or extended Theory or model by adding more variables as independent variable mediator or moderator to improve our understanding of the concept or for example the mechanism behind the relationships in other words you aim to provide more clarity and further explanation regarding a concept or set of relationships let me use one of my papers as an example this paper has been published in international Journal of human computer

interaction and test a model to explain online Financial trading among young adults as shown even the title of the paper highlights the contribution of this study as you can see first we have acknowledged the existing research that explains consumers acceptance and use of financial services Technologies supported by several references we also have explained that among the commonly employed theories in these studies are theory of plan Behavior M or technology acceptance model and theory of Flow by doing so we have demonstrated our awareness of the current body of knowledge and past research in this area then

we have argued that these Studies have mainly relied on these theories individually which has attracted criticism in the literature so to fill the Gap we proposed to integrate these theories and test the model we clearly stated that the present study contributes to the understanding of the mechanisms that govern consumers use of online Financial trading by combining these three main theories and we even went one step further by expanding the contribution stating the further novelty of these study stems from exploring theoretical extensions of the three theories by incorporating a greater number of factors as the antecedence

of these theories compared to former work in this regard another example for adding more variables to better understand a relationship is one of my articles published in Journal of advanced nursing on the relationship between organizational support and nurses out outcomes again we first demonstrated that we are aware of the past Studies by stating empirical studies on the relationship between nurse practice environment with Nurse's quality of care and satisfaction are abundant in the literature supported by several references then we highlighted the research gaps by stating little is known about the underlying mechanism behind the relationship between

organizational support and nurse's outcomes and finally we explain that we aim to fill this Gap by investigating a new variable in the model as the mediator the Third form of lack of clarity is when there are inconsistency or sometimes contradictory results of past studies this would be a good reason to conduct a new study to provide more clarity on the relationships of your interest for example some studies may have found a positive relationship between A and B some a negative relationship and others may have failed to find any significant relationships between the two constructs the

mixed or inconclusive results of past studies May indicate that these relationships work in certain conditions so we can conduct a new study to provide more clarity to the relationships between the constructs and improve our understanding of the mechanisms Behind these relationships in terms of how why or in which conditions these relationships work to fill the research Gap you may introduce a mediator or moderator to the model or for example conduct a qualitative study see my article published in the international Journal of Nursing practice as you can see we stated that the results of past empirical

studies are mixed and inconclusive so we need further study on this the second common type of research gaps in academic literature arises from lack of generalizability of past findings and need for replications indeed one of the common limitations of many studies is to what extent the findings can be applicable to other context or other settings or in other words to what extent you can generalize the finding these gaps are mainly around limited knowledge about the topic among new population in a new geographical location or at different time periods to address this research Gap you can

replicate the study in new populations like young adults older adults vulnerable groups immigrants lgbtq or indigenous people you may also replicate this study in a new context and new environment such as new organization smmes publicly listed companies or startups and so on or you can replicate the study in a new geographical location or even in different cultural settings like Iran China rural areas developing countries lwi income countries and by doing that you may get different or sometimes surprising results getting different results would make your study even more interesting another example can be updating the results

of a study or conducting research in different time periods like during the coid 19 pandemic during a financial crisis or during a war for example you also can compare the results across different settings different context and so on for example you can compare the results of conducting your study across different groups of population like men and women or different ethnic groups or across different contexts and time periods like developing and developed countries or pre and postco 19 period or during and after a financial crisis keep this in mind that to replicate the study you need

a strong justification you can't justify replication of a study in a new context by just stating few studies or even no Studies have been conducted in these context you should explain what makes this context unique of course from the lens of your study for example see my paper published in the international Journal of Bank marketing the relationship between financial literacy and quality of life has been tested before however as we stated this paper addresses two research gaps first testing this relationship among cancer patients second testing it in Iran as a new context to explain why

Iran is a unique country to be studied we explain the context from the lens of this study meaning the economic situation of the country financial literacy of Iranians as well as the unique health system in Iran I strongly recommend reading the introduction of this paper to see how we justify conducting this study in this new context the Third type of research gaps is about methodological limitations each study has some limitations this makes limitations of studies one of the most common research gaps to address the three examples for this group of research gaps can be limitations

of methodologies methods or measurements each methodology and Method have its own limitation for example quantitative research qualitative research experimental studies correlational studies cross-sectional research survey interview primary data secondary data regression analysis structureal equation modeling each has some limitations that you can address using other methodologies and methods for example you may conduct qualitative research to obtain deep understanding about a concept that has been heavily investigated by quantitative methods before another example is conducting longitudinal research or an experimental study on a topic that has been tested using cross-sectional data you can use a structureal equation modeling to

test a relationship or model that has been tested by regression analysis before all these are examples of methodical limitations that you can address by conducting a new study please keep this in mind that methodological gaps are not considered sufficient to justify conducting a new study especially if it's a tesis or desertation so methodological gaps usually are presented as complementary to strengthen your justification for conducting this study another example is the limitations of the current measures which can be addressed by developing and validating new measurements for example in one of my papers I developed and validated

a new scale to measure breast size satisfaction see the introduction of the paper after reviewing the results of past studies and highlighting their mixed results I stated that the mixed findings of previous studies can be due to using different instruments to assess breast so satisfaction next I critically reviewed the current instruments and their limitations to highlight the need for a new instrument as you can see at the end of this review I stated the objectives of this study which is the development of a new instrument to measure breast size satisfaction you can also validate constructs

that have been AR already developed in a new context for example as you can see in our paper published in Journal of cancer policy we assess the psychometric properties of the Persian version of the financial toxicity scale in a sample of cancer patients in Iran we explained that in less developed societies where patients generally experience more difficulties managing their various cost of treatment these measur should be verified according to the context if you found this video helpful please like this video write a comment and subscribe to this channel for more videos on publication and research

in the future thank you very much for watching