There are 5 important variables to be exploited to identify research gap:
- Citation Analysis – Scan highly cited papers that probably lead to prominent gaps in your research area. Also, spend time to go through the other papers that cite the particular highly cited paper to analyze the ongoing related research. If the particular highly cited paper have too many citations, narrowing down by analyzing the latest papers.
- Content analysis – Crunching down a particular content of a paper to extract the necessary gap.
- Meta analysis – please refer the previous post for details. Usually this method is used to collect a list of related literature/papers, organize the papers into several important constructs to identify the research gap.
- Systematic review – Usually using literature matrix and synthesize until find the research gap.
- Future research/limitation – Usually a academic paper will state the future works at the end of the paper or within the conclusion. When you synthesize papers in a particular topic, extract all the limitations and future works and compile. Afterwards analyze the trend and do the prediction of the upcoming related research.
