Identifying the Gap in the Literature
A study needs a reason to exist that is stronger than nobody having done it in your organisation yet. The gap statement is where that reason is made — and in the five examined works read for this library, it is made the same way every time.
What the source means by a gap
The supplied teaching source treats the gap as the hinge between the literature and the study. It is named in the definition of the review, in the review's stated aims, and again in the sequence of steps for writing it.
Three things follow from those statements and are worth separating out. The gap is a shortfall in the literature, not a shortfall in your organisation. It carries the significance of the study, so it is an argument rather than an observation. And it generates the question rather than following from it — the source is explicit that gaps probably produce a more focused research question or hypothesis.
That last point reverses the order most first attempts use. If the question came first and the gap was assembled afterwards to justify it, the gap will read as retrofitted, because it was. Related territory is covered on what is a literature review and step 4: deciding your research question.
The four-move grammar
Five examined and published research works were read structurally for this library: a doctoral action research thesis in an engineering organisation, a doctoral thesis on research and development productivity, a portfolio doctorate on project success, a journal paper on risk management in research and development projects, and a conference paper on research trends. They differ in almost every structural respect. They do not differ in how they state a gap.
- Prior work converges on X
- But disagrees on / has not examined Y
- Therefore opportunities for further research
- Therefore this study does Z
THE FOUR MOVES, AND WHAT EACH ONE HAS TO CONTAIN
| Move | What it must contain | How a reader checks it | How it fails |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prior work converges on X | A positive statement of what the field agrees on, attributed to more than one work | Do the cited works actually agree, and on the thing you say they agree on? | Convergence asserted with one citation, or with none |
| But disagrees on / has not examined Y | The specific point of dissonance or the specific absence | Could a reader go looking for Y and confirm it is missing? | Y stated so broadly that no search could confirm or refute it |
| Therefore opportunities for further research | The consequence — why the absence matters to anyone | Does anything follow from Y being unknown? | The step is skipped, leaving an absence with no stakes attached |
| Therefore this study does Z | What this study will do about it, in operational terms | Does Z address Y, or something adjacent to it? | Z is larger or smaller than Y, so the study cannot close the gap it opened |
The grammar is an observation about the five works read for this library. Columns two to four are synthesis added here.
The fourth move is where most drafts drift. A gap about disagreement over measurement criteria, followed by a study that surveys practitioner attitudes, has changed subject between move two and move four. The two have to be the same object seen from either side.
Five real placements compared
The grammar is stable. Where the statement sits, and what form it takes, is not. The five works place it in five different ways, and each placement has a cost and a benefit.
WHERE THE GAP STATEMENT SITS IN FIVE EXAMINED WORKS
| Work | Placement and form | What it buys | What it costs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exemplar B — doctoral thesis, mixed methods | Tabulated. A five-row matrix at the end of the theory chapter with columns for characteristic, relationship and what is in the literature; three rows state a gap explicitly. The hypotheses are then derived directly from those rows. | The gap becomes auditable rather than rhetorical — a reader can check it row by row, and the derivation of each hypothesis is visible | Requires the gaps to be separable and parallel; a gap that is one continuous argument does not tabulate |
| Exemplar A — action research thesis | Absent from the conventional slot. The review chapter has no concluding section and no gap statement where one would be expected; the nearest equivalent is a mid-chapter critique justifying the method choice, and the contribution claim is deferred to the methodology and conclusion chapters. | Consistent with an emergent review driven by events in the field, where the gap could not have been fully stated in advance | A reader looking for the justification has to assemble it from three chapters; the work is harder to summarise and harder to cite |
| Exemplar C — portfolio doctorate | At the end of each introduction, immediately before the research questions, in all three papers. The move is consistent: the literature converges but also disagrees, a universal checklist is impossible, criteria must be tailored to context, therefore opportunities for further research. A second and sharper gap is built from negative space — a topic absent from the dominant professional body of knowledge while local regulation has forced it into everyday practice. | Position is predictable and the gap sits directly against the questions it produces; the negative-space gap is genuinely strong | The portfolio format requires each paper to stand alone, so the softer "context varies" gap is restated three times and its weakness is restated with it |
| Exemplar D — journal paper | Stated twice. A softer gap closes the introduction — the literature lacks inquiries substantiating the method's claimed effectiveness in this context. An operational gap closes the review: existing case studies are too few to generalise, therefore this paper extends a prior study in two specific ways. | The second statement converts the gap into a two-item work plan, so the reader knows exactly what the paper will do and can check whether it did it | Two statements of different strength invite the reader to judge the paper against the weaker one |
| Exemplar E — conference paper | Layered and date-bounded. In the introduction, the evolving research trends "have been incompletely identified after 2006". At the end of the review section, the relationship between those trends and events in wider society "has not been discovered". | A date makes the claim falsifiable — a reader can go to the literature after that year and test it | A date-bounded gap ages; it also invites the objection that later work exists and was missed |
Structural observations about these five works only, drawn from front matter, contents, review sections and abstracts. No author, institution, journal or publisher is identified. How the five organise their reviews as a whole is treated on the review-organisation page.
Two of the five are worth copying directly. The tabulated matrix makes the gap checkable line by line. The two-item work plan makes the response to it checkable. Between them they solve the problem that a gap statement is otherwise a claim nobody can test. The wider structural comparison sits on how real literature reviews are organised.
Bounded gaps and unbounded ones
Two of the five bound their gap — one by a date, one by a documented absence from a named body of knowledge. The others bound it by context: the literature disagrees, criteria vary by setting, therefore more research is warranted. The difference is not stylistic.
Bounded — a reader can test it
- Date-bounded: "incompletely identified after 2006" — go to the literature after that year and check
- Absence-bounded: the topic is not in a specified body of knowledge, while practice has been forced to deal with it
- Population-bounded: examined in one sector or one project type and not in another, named one
- Method-bounded: the relationship has been asserted but not quantified, or examined retrospectively but never prospectively
- Each of these can be proved wrong by someone producing the missing work — which is exactly what makes them worth stating
Unbounded — nothing to test
- "Context varies, so findings may not transfer"
- "There is limited research in this area"
- "More research is needed"
- "No study has examined this in my organisation"
- All four may be true. None of them can be checked, and none of them tells a reader what would count as the gap being closed
The upgrade is usually available. "Context varies" becomes bounded the moment you name the two contexts and say what has been examined in one and not the other. That is a claim someone can check, and checkability is the whole point.
Where the gap statement goes in your own document
The source's example sequence for writing a review mentions the gap three times, in three different roles. Reading them together shows that the gap is not stated once and dropped.
- Step 3 of the review"Highlight the gap in the literatures and point out comparisons and dissonances in various readings." First statement, made out of the evidence just presented. The dissonances are the raw material.
- Step 6 of the review"Restate the problem and the gap that your study will address." Second statement, narrowed. The restatement is what carries the reader from the field to your study.
- Step 7 of the review"Identify the relevance of your chosen methods to address the identified gap." The gap now has to justify a method choice, which is the point at which a vague gap becomes visibly unusable.
- The conclusion of the whole studyNot in the source's sequence, but implied by it: the contribution claim has to be answerable to the gap that opened the study. A study that closes a different gap from the one it stated has changed subject.
Step 7 is the useful diagnostic and it is often the first place the trouble shows. If you cannot say why a survey rather than interviews addresses your gap, the gap is probably a topic rather than a shortfall. The sequence in full is treated on writing the literature review.
Building an auditable gap matrix
The tabulated approach is the most transferable device in the five works, because it forces every gap claim into the same shape and lets a reader inspect them one at a time. The structure is three columns: the characteristic under examination, the relationship being claimed about it, and what the literature currently says.
A GAP MATRIX IN THE TABULATED FORM
| Characteristic | Relationship claimed | What is in the literature? |
|---|---|---|
| Team dispersion | Greater dispersion reduces the rate of informal knowledge transfer | Reported consistently across several studies in software and product development settings |
| Meeting cadence | More frequent synchronous contact offsets dispersion effects | Reported, but the studies disagree on the direction of the effect above a certain frequency — a dissonance, not an absence |
| Handover between time zones | Sequential working across time zones changes what can be transferred and when | There is a gap in the literature regarding how transfer is affected where working hours do not overlap at all |
| Contract type | Commercial arrangement shapes what teams are willing to share | Has not been reported in the literature for distributed teams; examined only for co-located joint ventures |
| Delivery performance | Reduced informal transfer shows up in delivery outcomes | Asserted in practitioner writing; not tested against project outcome data in the works reviewed |
Rows three and four state absences; row two states a disagreement; rows one and five state what is established and what is only asserted. In the examined thesis this device was used to derive the hypotheses directly from the gap rows.
The value is in what the table refuses to hide. A row where the third column reads "limited research" is a row you have not finished. A matrix in which every row is a gap is a matrix nobody will believe. Two or three genuine gaps among five rows is what a real reading of a field usually produces.
What to do with each kind of row
False gaps, and how to tell
The commonest false gap is the one produced by searching too narrowly. The supplied source records the pattern directly: students report finding nothing in the literature related to their topic, and in virtually every case the reason is that they looked only for work that was exactly the same as their own.
That produces a gap statement of the form "no study has examined X in Y", where X and Y are so tightly specified that the sentence is trivially true and carries no significance whatever. Nobody has studied your organisation. That is not a shortfall in the knowledge base. The searching problem behind it is treated on why review the literature early.
Four false gaps and their repairs
"No study has examined this exact combination"
Almost always true and almost never significant. Repair: widen until you find the related work, then state the gap as the distance between that work and yours.
"Nobody has researched this in my organisation"
A gap in the organisation's knowledge, not the field's. Repair: identify the property of the setting that makes it different, and make that property the gap.
"This is an emerging area with limited research"
Often a search artefact, and the source warns that a topic with little literature is one you may be advised against. Repair: check adjacent disciplines before claiming novelty.
"The relationship between A and B is not well understood"
True of most relationships and closable by no single study. Repair: bound it — which aspect, in which population, unexamined by which method.
What the source does not give you
One further caution about how the gap is later redeemed. The gap opens a debt and the contribution claim settles it, so the two have to be the same size. A study whose limitations concede a single organisation and a small sample, and whose contribution claims relevance to other industries, has settled a larger debt than it incurred. That pairing is examined on stating limitations and contribution.
Gap statement pre-flight
- The convergence in move one is attributed to more than one work and stated as a claim, not a topic
- The absence or disagreement in move two is specific enough that a reader could go and check it
- You can say what would have to be published for the gap to be closed
- The gap is bounded by a date, a population, a method or a documented absence — not by the observation that contexts vary
- The study described in move four addresses the same object as move two, at the same scale
- The gap is stated where the reader needs it, and restated before the research questions
- Your method choice can be justified by reference to the gap, not just to convenience
- The contribution you will claim at the end is no larger than the gap you opened at the start
What to carry forward
- The gap is the argument that your study should exist. The source is explicit that it generates the question rather than following from it.
- Use the four-move grammar: convergence, then the specific absence or disagreement, then why it matters, then what you will do about it.
- Bound the gap by a date, a population, a method or a documented absence. "Context varies" is available to everybody and testable by nobody.
- Tabulate the gap if it will tabulate. Making it auditable row by row is the single most copyable device in the five works read for this library.
- Convert the gap into a work plan of specific items, so a reader can check whether you did what you said you would.
- Nobody having studied your organisation is not a gap in the knowledge base. Name the property of the setting that makes it different, and make that the gap.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a gap in the literature and a problem in my organisation?
A gap is a shortfall in what the published literature knows; an organisational problem is a shortfall in what your organisation is doing. The two are often connected — a practical problem is a legitimate source of a research idea — but the gap statement has to be about the literature. "We handle this badly" is a motivation; "this relationship has been examined only in a different project type" is a gap.
How specific does a gap statement need to be?
Specific enough that a reader could search the literature and confirm or refute it. That is the practical meaning of a bounded gap. Two of the five works read for this library bound theirs by a date and by a documented absence from a named body of knowledge; both can be tested by anyone who wants to.
Where in the document should the gap statement go?
The source does not prescribe a position. The five examined works place it in five different ways — tabulated at the end of a theory chapter, at the end of each introduction, twice in one paper, date-bounded across two sections, and in one case not in the conventional slot at all. The workable rule is that it must appear immediately before whatever it justifies, usually the research questions.
Can a disagreement between studies be a gap?
Yes, and it is often stronger than an absence, because the disagreement gives you an existing conversation to enter. State what the works disagree about and what evidence would settle it. An absence tells the reader nothing is there; a disagreement tells them something is unresolved and shows them the terms.
What if I cannot find a gap at all?
That is usually a search problem rather than a field that has been exhausted. The supplied source records that students who report finding nothing related to their topic have almost always searched only for work identical to their own. Widen the search into adjacent disciplines and settings, then state the gap as the distance between what you found and what you propose.
Does every study need hypotheses derived from the gap?
No. Of the five works read for this library only one uses hypotheses, and that one derives them directly from the rows of its tabulated gap matrix. The other four use research questions, purpose statements or prose aims. What matters is that whatever follows the gap is visibly produced by it.
References and source attribution
- Trochim, W. M. K. 2006, Research Methods Knowledge Base, http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/probform.php.
- O'Leary, Z. 2017, The Essential Guide to Doing Your Research Project, 3rd ed., Sage Publications, London.
- Bryman, A. 2016, Social Research Methods, 5th ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford.
- Naoum, S. G. 2013, Dissertation Research & Writing for Construction Students, 3rd ed., Routledge.
- The supplied teaching source: master's-level teaching notes and accompanying slides on reviewing the literature, together with the earlier material on the research process. All statements attributed to "the source" are drawn from that material.
- Five examined and published research works in project management and related fields — a 1999 doctoral action research thesis, a 2016 doctoral thesis, a 2004 portfolio doctorate, a 2014 journal paper and a 2017/2018 conference paper — read structurally for this library and referred to as Exemplars A to E. No author, institution, journal or publisher is identified.
Suggested questions for Ask KEVOS
- Rewrite my gap statement using the four-move grammar.
- Is my gap bounded, and if not, how could I bound it by date, population or method?
- Build a gap matrix from my literature notes and tell me which rows are not yet finished.
- What would have to be published for my gap to be closed?
- Does the study I am proposing address the same object as the gap I have stated?
- Compare where the five exemplar works place their gap statements and which placement suits my document.