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How To Find A Research Gap, Quickly

A step-by-step guide for new researchers

By: Derek Jansen (MBA) | Reviewer: Eunice Rautenbach (DTech) | April 2023

If you’ve got a dissertation, thesis or research project coming up, one of the first (and most important) things you’ll need to do is find a suitable research gap . In this post, we’ll share a straightforward process to help you uncover high-quality, original research gaps in a very time-efficient manner.

Overview: Finding Research Gaps

• What exactly is a research gap?
• Research gap vs research topic
• How to find potential research gaps
• How to evaluate research gaps (and topics)
• Key takeaways

What is a research gap?

As a starting point, it’s useful to first define what we mean by research gap, to ensure we’re all on the same page. The term “research gap” gets thrown around quite loosely by students and academics alike, so let’s clear that up.

Simply put, a research gap is any space where there’s a lack of solid, agreed-upon research regarding a specific topic, issue or phenomenon. In other words, there’s a lack of established knowledge and, consequently, a need for further research.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example to illustrate a research gap.

Within the existing research regarding factors affect job satisfaction , there may be a wealth of established and agreed-upon empirical work within a US and UK context , but very little research within Eastern nations such as Japan or Korea . Given that these nations have distinctly different national cultures and workforce compositions compared to the West, it’s plausible that the factors that contribute toward job satisfaction may also be different. Therefore, a research gap emerges for studies that explore this matter.

This example is purely hypothetical (and there’s probably plenty of research covering this already), but it illustrates the core point that a research gap reflects a lack of firmly established knowledge regarding a specific matter . Given this lack, an opportunity exists for researchers (like you) to go on and fill the gap.

So, it’s the same as a research topic?

Not quite – but they are connected. A research gap refers to an area where there’s a lack of settled research , whereas a research topic outlines the focus of a specific study . Despite being different things, these two are related because research gaps are the birthplace of research topics. In other words, by identifying a clear research gap, you have a foundation from which you can build a research topic for your specific study. Your study is unlikely to resolve the entire research gap on it’s own, but it will contribute towards it .

If you’d like to learn more, we’ve got a comprehensive post that covers research gaps (including the different types of research gaps), as well as an explainer video below.

How to find a research gap

Now that we’ve defined what a research gap is, it’s time to get down to the process of finding potential research gaps that you can use as a basis for potential research topics. Importantly, it’s worth noting that this is just one way (of many) to find a research gap (and consequently a topic). We’re not proposing that it’s the only way or best way, but it’s certainly a relatively quick way to identify opportunities.

Step 1: Identify your broad area of interest

The very first step to finding a research gap is to decide on your general area of interest . For example, if you were undertaking a dissertation as part of an MBA degree, you may decide that you’re interested in corporate reputation, HR strategy, or leadership styles. As you can see, these are broad categories – there’s no need to get super specific just yet. Of course, if there is something very specific that you’re interested in, that’s great – but don’t feel pressured to narrow it down too much right now.

Equally important is to make sure that this area of interest is allowed by your university or whichever institution you’ll be proposing your research to. This might sound dead obvious, but you’ll be surprised how many times we’ve seen students run down a path with great excitement, only to later learn that their university wants a very specific area of focus in terms of topic (and their area of interest doesn’t qualify).

Step 2: Do an initial literature scan

Once you’ve pinned down your broad area (or areas) of interest, the next step is to head over to Google Scholar to undertake an initial literature scan . If you’re not familiar with this tool, Google Scholar is a great starting point for finding academic literature on pretty much any topic, as it uses Google’s powerful search capabilities to hunt down relevant academic literature. It’s certainly not the be-all and end-all of literature search tools, but it’s a useful starting point .

Within Google Scholar, you’ll want to do a few searches using keywords that are relevant to your area of interest. Sticking with our earlier example, we could use the key phrase “job satisfaction”, or we may want to get a little more specific – perhaps “job satisfaction for millennials” or “job satisfaction in Japan”.

It’s always a good idea to play around with as many keywords/phrases as you can think up.  Take an iterative approach here and see which keywords yield the most relevant results for you. Keep each search open in a new tab, as this will help keep things organised for the next steps.

Once you’ve searched for a few different keywords/phrases, you’ll need to do some refining for each of the searches you undertook. Specifically, you’ll need to filter the results down to the most recent papers . You can do this by selecting the time period in the top left corner (see the example below).

Filtering to the current year is typically a good choice (especially for fast-moving research areas), but in some cases, you may need to filter to the last two years . If you’re undertaking this task in January or February, for example, you’ll likely need to select a two-year period.

Need a helping hand?

Step 3: Review and shortlist articles that interest you

Once you’ve run a few searches using different keywords and phrases, you’ll need to scan through the results to see what looks most relevant and interesting to you. At this stage, you can just look at the titles and abstracts (the description provided by Google Scholar) – don’t worry about reading the actual article just yet.

Next, select 5 – 10 articles that interest you and open them up. Here, we’re making the assumption that your university has provided you with access to a decent range of academic databases. In some cases, Google Scholar will link you directly to a PDF of the article, but in most cases, you’ll need paid access. If you don’t have this (for example, if you’re still applying to a university), you can look at two options:

Open-access articles – these are free articles which you can access without any journal subscription. A quick Google search (the regular Google) will help you find open-access journals in your area of interest, but you can also have a look at DOAJ and Elsevier Open Access.

DeepDyve – this is a monthly subscription service that allows you to get access to a broad range of journals. At the time of shooting this video, their monthly subscription is around $50 and they do offer a free trial, which may be sufficient for your project.

Step 4: Skim-read your article shortlist

Now, it’s time to dig into your article shortlist and do some reading. But don’t worry, you don’t need to read the articles from start to finish – you just need to focus on a few key sections.

Specifically, you’ll need to pay attention to the following:

• The abstract (which you’ve probably already read a portion of in Google Scholar)
• The introduction – this will give you a bit more detail about the context and background of the study, as well as what the researchers were trying to achieve (their research aims)
• The discussion or conclusion – this will tell you what the researchers found

By skimming through these three sections for each journal article on your shortlist, you’ll gain a reasonable idea of what each study was about, without having to dig into the painful details. Generally, these sections are usually quite short, so it shouldn’t take you too long.

Step 5: Go “FRIN hunting”

This is where the magic happens. Within each of the articles on your shortlist, you’ll want to search for a few very specific phrases , namely:

• Future research
• Further research
• Research opportunities
• Research directions

All of these terms are commonly found in what we call the “FRIN” section . FRIN stands for “further research is needed”. The FRIN is where the researchers explain what other researchers could do to build on their study, or just on the research area in general. In other words, the FRIN section is where you can find fresh opportunities for novel research . Most empirical studies will either have a dedicated FRIN section or paragraph, or they’ll allude to the FRIN toward the very end of the article. You’ll need to do a little scanning, but it’s usually pretty easy to spot.

It’s worth mentioning that naturally, the FRIN doesn’t hand you a list of research gaps on a platter. It’s not a silver bullet for finding research gaps – but it’s the closest thing to it. Realistically, the FRIN section helps you shortcut the gap-hunting process  by highlighting novel research avenues that are worth exploring.

This probably sounds a little conceptual, so let’s have a look at a few examples:

The impact of overeducation on job outcomes: Evidence from Saudi Arabia (Alzubaidi, 2020)

If you scroll down to the bottom of this article, you’ll see there’s a dedicated section called “Limitations and directions for future research”. Here they talk about the limitations of the study and provide suggestions about how future researchers could improve upon their work and overcome the limitations.

Perceived organizational support and job satisfaction: a moderated mediation model of proactive personality and psychological empowerment (Maan et al, 2020)

In this article, within the limitations section, they provide a wonderfully systematic structure where they discuss each limitation, followed by a proposal as to how future studies can overcome the respective limitation. In doing so, they are providing very specific research opportunities for other researchers.

Medical professionals’ job satisfaction and telemedicine readiness during the COVID-19 pandemic: solutions to improve medical practice in Egypt (El-Mazahy et al, 2023)

In this article, they don’t have a dedicated section discussing the FRIN, but we can deduct it based on the limitations section. For example, they state that an evaluation of the knowledge about telemedicine and technology-related skills would have enabled studying their independent effect on the perception of telemedicine.

Follow this FRIN-seeking process for the articles you shortlisted and map out any potentially interesting research gaps . You may find that you need to look at a larger number of articles to find something interesting, or you might find that your area of interest shifts as you engage in the reading – this is perfectly natural. Take as much time as you need to develop a shortlist of potential research gaps that interest you.

Importantly, once you’ve developed a shortlist of potential research gaps, you need to return to Google Scholar to double-check that there aren’t fresh studies that have already addressed the gap. Remember, if you’re looking at papers from two years ago in a fast-moving field, someone else may have jumped on it . Nevertheless, there could still very well be a unique angle you could take – perhaps a contextual gap (e.g. a specific country, industry, etc.).

Ultimately, the need for originality will depend on your specific university’s requirements and the level of study. For example, if you’re doing an undergraduate research project, the originality requirements likely won’t be as gruelling as say a Masters or PhD project. So, make sure you have a clear understanding of what your university’s expectations are. A good way to do this is to look at past dissertations and theses for your specific programme. You can usually find these in the university library or by asking the faculty.

How to evaluate potential research gaps

Once you’ve developed a shortlist of potential research gaps (and resultant potential research topics) that interest you, you’ll need to systematically evaluate  them  to choose a winner. There are many factors to consider here, but some important ones include the following:

• Originality and value – is the topic sufficiently novel and will addressing it create value?
• Data access – will you be able to get access to the sample of interest?
• Costs – will there be additional costs involved for data collection and/or analysis?
• Timeframes – will you be able to collect and analyse the data within the timeframe required by your university?
• Supervisor support – is there a suitable supervisor available to support your project from start to finish?

To help you evaluate your options systematically, we’ve got a topic evaluation worksheet that allows you to score each potential topic against a comprehensive set of criteria. You can access the worksheet completely free of charge here .

Recap: Key Takeaways

We’ve covered quite a lot of ground in this post. Here are the key takeaways:

• A research gap is any space where there’s a lack of solid, agreed-upon research regarding a specific topic/issue/phenomenon.
• Unique research topics emerge from research gaps , so it’s essential to first identify high-quality research gaps before you attempt to define a topic.
• To find potential research gaps, start by seeking out recent journal articles on Google Scholar and pay particular attention to the FRIN section to identify novel opportunities.
• Once you have a shortlist of prospective research gaps and resultant topic ideas, evaluate them systematically using a comprehensive set of criteria.

If you’d like to get hands-on help finding a research gap and research topic, be sure to check out our private coaching service , where we hold your hand through the research journey, step by step.

Psst… there’s more (for free)

This post is part of our dissertation mini-course, which covers everything you need to get started with your dissertation, thesis or research project. 

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Identifying Research Gaps to Pursue Innovative Research

This article is an excerpt from a lecture given by my Ph.D. guide, a researcher in public health. She advised us on how to identify research gaps to pursue innovative research in our fields.

What is a Research Gap?

Today we are talking about the research gap: what is it, how to identify it, and how to make use of it so that you can pursue innovative research. Now, how many of you have ever felt you had discovered a new and exciting research question , only to find that it had already been written about? I have experienced this more times than I can count. Graduate studies come with pressure to add new knowledge to the field. We can contribute to the progress and knowledge of humanity. To do this, we need to first learn to identify research gaps in the existing literature.

A research gap is, simply, a topic or area for which missing or insufficient information limits the ability to reach a conclusion for a question. It should not be confused with a research question, however. For example, if we ask the research question of what the healthiest diet for humans is, we would find many studies and possible answers to this question. On the other hand, if we were to ask the research question of what are the effects of antidepressants on pregnant women, we would not find much-existing data. This is a research gap. When we identify a research gap, we identify a direction for potentially new and exciting research.

How to Identify Research Gap?

Considering the volume of existing research, identifying research gaps can seem overwhelming or even impossible. I don’t have time to read every paper published on public health. Similarly, you guys don’t have time to read every paper. So how can you identify a research gap?

There are different techniques in various disciplines, but we can reduce most of them down to a few steps, which are:

• Identify your key motivating issue/question
• Identify key terms associated with this issue
• Review the literature, searching for these key terms and identifying relevant publications
• Review the literature cited by the key publications which you located in the above step
• Identify issues not addressed by  the literature relating to your critical  motivating issue

It is the last step which we all find the most challenging. It can be difficult to figure out what an article is  not  saying. I like to keep a list of notes of biased or inconsistent information. You could also track what authors write as “directions for future research,” which often can point us towards the existing gaps.

Different Types of Research Gaps

Identifying research gaps is an essential step in conducting research, as it helps researchers to refine their research questions and to focus their research efforts on areas where there is a need for more knowledge or understanding.

1. Knowledge gaps

These are gaps in knowledge or understanding of a subject, where more research is needed to fill the gaps. For example, there may be a lack of understanding of the mechanisms behind a particular disease or how a specific technology works.

2. Conceptual gaps

These are gaps in the conceptual framework or theoretical understanding of a subject. For example, there may be a need for more research to understand the relationship between two concepts or to refine a theoretical framework.

3. Methodological gaps

These are gaps in the methods used to study a particular subject. For example, there may be a need for more research to develop new research methods or to refine existing methods to address specific research questions.

4. Data gaps

These are gaps in the data available on a particular subject. For example, there may be a need for more research to collect data on a specific population or to develop new measures to collect data on a particular construct.

5. Practical gaps

These are gaps in the application of research findings to practical situations. For example, there may be a need for more research to understand how to implement evidence-based practices in real-world settings or to identify barriers to implementing such practices.

Examples of Research Gap

Limited understanding of the underlying mechanisms of a disease:.

Despite significant research on a particular disease, there may be a lack of understanding of the underlying mechanisms of the disease. For example, although much research has been done on Alzheimer’s disease, the exact mechanisms that lead to the disease are not yet fully understood.

Inconsistencies in the findings of previous research:

When previous research on a particular topic has inconsistent findings, there may be a need for further research to clarify or resolve these inconsistencies. For example, previous research on the effectiveness of a particular treatment for a medical condition may have produced inconsistent findings, indicating a need for further research to determine the true effectiveness of the treatment.

Limited research on emerging technologies:

As new technologies emerge, there may be limited research on their applications, benefits, and potential drawbacks. For example, with the increasing use of artificial intelligence in various industries, there is a need for further research on the ethical, legal, and social implications of AI.

How to Deal with Literature Gap?

Once you have identified the literature gaps, it is critical to prioritize. You may find many questions which remain to be answered in the literature. Often one question must be answered before the next can be addressed. In prioritizing the gaps, you have identified, you should consider your funding agency or stakeholders, the needs of the field, and the relevance of your questions to what is currently being studied. Also, consider your own resources and ability to conduct the research you’re considering. Once you have done this, you can narrow your search down to an appropriate question.

Tools to Help Your Search

There are thousands of new articles published every day, and staying up to date on the literature can be overwhelming. You should take advantage of the technology that is available. Some services include  PubCrawler ,  Feedly ,  Google Scholar , and PubMed updates. Stay up to date on social media forums where scholars share new discoveries, such as Twitter. Reference managers such as  Mendeley  can help you keep your references well-organized. I personally have had success using Google Scholar and PubMed to stay current on new developments and track which gaps remain in my personal areas of interest.

The most important thing I want to impress upon you today is that you will struggle to  choose a research topic  that is innovative and exciting if you don’t know the existing literature well. This is why identifying research gaps starts with an extensive and thorough  literature review . But give yourself some boundaries.  You don’t need to read every paper that has ever been written on a topic. You may find yourself thinking you’re on the right track and then suddenly coming across a paper that you had intended to write! It happens to everyone- it happens to me quite often. Don’t give up- keep reading and you’ll find what you’re looking for.

Class dismissed!

How do you identify research gaps? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Frequently Asked Questions

A research gap can be identified by looking for a topic or area with missing or insufficient information that limits the ability to reach a conclusion for a question.

Identifying a research gap is important as it provides a direction for potentially new research or helps bridge the gap in existing literature.

Gap in research is a topic or area with missing or insufficient information. A research gap limits the ability to reach a conclusion for a question.

Thank u for your suggestion.

Very useful tips specially for a beginner

Thank you. This is helpful. I find that I’m overwhelmed with literatures. As I read on a particular topic, and in a particular direction I find that other conflicting issues, topic a and ideas keep popping up, making me more confused.

I am very grateful for your advice. It’s just on point.

The clearest, exhaustive, and brief explanation I have ever read.

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What is a Research Gap

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Table of Contents

If you are a young researcher, or even still finishing your studies, you’ll probably notice that your academic environment revolves around certain research topics, probably linked to your department or to the interest of your mentor and direct colleagues. For example, if your department is currently doing research in nanotechnology applied to medicine, it is only natural that you feel compelled to follow this line of research. Hopefully, it’s something you feel familiar with and interested in – although you might take your own twists and turns along your career.

Many scientists end up continuing their academic legacy during their professional careers, writing about their own practical experiences in the field and adapting classic methodologies to a present context. However, each and every researcher dreams about being a pioneer in a subject one day, by discovering a topic that hasn’t been approached before by any other scientist. This is a research gap.

Research gaps are particularly useful for the advance of science, in general. Finding a research gap and having the means to develop a complete and sustained study on it can be very rewarding for the scientist (or team of scientists), not to mention how its new findings can positively impact our whole society.

How to Find a Gap in Research

How many times have you felt that you have finally formulated THAT new and exciting question, only to find out later that it had been addressed before? Probably more times than you can count.

There are some steps you can take to help identify research gaps, since it is impossible to go through all the information and research available nowadays:

• Select a topic or question that motivates you: Research can take a long time and surely a large amount of physical, intellectual and emotional effort, therefore choose a topic that can keep you motivated throughout the process.
• Find keywords and related terms to your selected topic: Besides synthesizing the topic to its essential core, this will help you in the next step.
• Use the identified keywords to search literature: From your findings in the above step, identify relevant publications and cited literature in those publications.
• Look for topics or issues that are missing or not addressed within (or related to) your main topic.
• Read systematic reviews: These documents plunge deeply into scholarly literature and identify trends and paradigm shifts in fields of study. Sometimes they reveal areas or topics that need more attention from researchers and scientists.

Keeping track of all the new literature being published every day is an impossible mission. Remember that there is technology to make your daily tasks easier, and reviewing literature can be one of them. Some online databases offer up-to-date publication lists with quite effective search features:

• Elsevier’s Scope
• Google Scholar

Of course, these tools may be more or less effective depending on knowledge fields. There might be even better ones for your specific topic of research; you can learn about them from more experienced colleagues or mentors.

Find out how FINER research framework can help you formulate your research question.

Literature Gap

The expression “literature gap” is used with the same intention as “research gap.” When there is a gap in the research itself, there will also naturally be a gap in the literature. Nevertheless, it is important to stress out the importance of language or text formulations that can help identify a research/literature gap or, on the other hand, making clear that a research gap is being addressed.

When looking for research gaps across publications you may have noticed sentences like:

…has/have not been… (studied/reported/elucidated) …is required/needed… …the key question is/remains… …it is important to address…

These expressions often indicate gaps; issues or topics related to the main question that still hasn’t been subject to a scientific study. Therefore, it is important to take notice of them: who knows if one of these sentences is hiding your way to fame.

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Last Updated: Jun 27, 2023 Views: 464417

What is a research gap.

A research gap is a question or a problem that has not been answered by any of the existing studies or research within your field. Sometimes, a research gap exists when there is a concept or new idea that hasn't been studied at all. Sometimes you'll find a research gap if all the existing research is outdated and in need of new/updated research (studies on Internet use in 2001, for example). Or, perhaps a specific population has not been well studied (perhaps there are plenty of studies on teenagers and video games, but not enough studies on toddlers and video games, for example). These are just a few examples, but any research gap you find is an area where more studies and more research need to be conducted. Please view this video clip from our Sage Research Methods database for more helpful information: How Do You Identify Gaps in Literature?

How do I find one?

It will take a lot of research and reading.  You'll need to be very familiar with all the studies that have already been done, and what those studies contributed to the overall body of knowledge about that topic. Make a list of any questions you have about your topic and then do some research to see if those questions have already been answered satisfactorily. If they haven't, perhaps you've discovered a gap!  Here are some strategies you can use to make the most of your time:

• One useful trick is to look at the “suggestions for future research” or conclusion section of existing studies on your topic. Many times, the authors will identify areas where they think a research gap exists, and what studies they think need to be done in the future.
• As you are researching, you will most likely come across citations for seminal works in your research field. These are the research studies that you see mentioned again and again in the literature.  In addition to finding those and reading them, you can use a database like Web of Science to follow the research trail and discover all the other articles that have cited these. See the FAQ: I found the perfect article for my paper. How do I find other articles and books that have cited it? on how to do this. One way to quickly track down these seminal works is to use a database like SAGE Navigator, a social sciences literature review tool. It is one of the products available via our SAGE Knowledge database.
• In the PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES databases, you can select literature review, systematic review, and meta analysis under the Methodology section in the advanced search to quickly locate these. See the FAQ: Where can I find a qualitative or quantitative study? for more information on how to find the Methodology section in these two databases.
• In CINAHL , you can select Systematic review under the Publication Type field in the advanced search. 
• In Web of Science , check the box beside Review under the Document Type heading in the “Refine Results” sidebar to the right of the list of search hits.
• If the database you are searching does not offer a way to filter your results by document type, publication type, or methodology in the advanced search, you can include these phrases (“literature reviews,” meta-analyses, or “systematic reviews”) in your search string.  For example, “video games” AND “literature reviews” could be a possible search that you could try.

Please give these suggestions a try and contact a librarian for additional assistance.

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What is a Research Gap? How to Identify it?

“ Choosing a topic, research or subject that has not been answered or explored yet by any other scientists is referred to as a research gap.” 

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to find one! 

When you start reading literature, initially you may notice that nothing is left to study! That everyone feels, even me too when I was in my initial days of PhD. But when you get enough research experience, you can find gaps in research easily. 

“Every research is incomplete.”

Indeed, a research work completes when it states a gap or unexplored area with the final conclusion, so that future research will get direction. 

The process of research or doctorate starts (immediately after you get admission) by initiating searching a research gap which leads to postulating a research question. 

 A research question is your title or statement of thesis using which you will find your thesis objectives and address a particular question. It can be stated only by finding a research or literature gap. 

And as I said, it’s quite difficult for PhD students.  

So in this blog post, I will explain to you what a research or literature gap is and how you can identify it. 

How to appear in the PhD Interview?

What is a research or literature gap? 

Firstly, a research/ knowledge gap or literature gap is though different terms but has a similar meaning. The reason is that a research problem can be addressed either by experimental research and literature review. 

Definition: 

A research or literature gap is a problem or unexplored/ underexplored area of the existing research. 

Choosing a topic, research or subject that has not been answered or explored yet by any other scientist is referred to as a research gap. 

Let us start with an example;

Take a look at the hypothetical closing sentence.

“3 common mutations IVS1-5, IVS1-1 and CD8/9 have been selected for the present to screen thalassemia patients. A common mutation IVS1-5 has been identified in 2 out of 70 unrelated thalassemia patients using the conventional PCR technique.” 

Let’s say you want to do research on the Genetics of Thalassemia. Suppose this one is the closing paragraph of some research article and is a final conclusion. How can you find a research gap here? 

I find many gaps, Let us find out some of them;

• The sample size is too small. 
• There are 12 common mutations in beta-thalassemia which are present in almost 80% of cases. Only three are selected in the present study. 
• The present study is geologically restricted. 
• The author has used a single conventional PCR technique. More techniques like DNA sequencing can be used to address the same problem, which possibly provides more knowledge and can identify novel mutations as well. 
• The author hasn’t clarified which type of thalassemia patients they have included in the present study. 

These are some of the possible gaps in the present research. Let’s look at other closing statements for the same. 

“3 common mutations IVS1-5, IVS1-1 and CD8/9 have been selected for the present to screen thalassemia patients. A common mutation IVS1-5 has been identified in 2 out of 70 unrelated thalassemia patients using the conventional PCR technique. The present study can be strengthened by increasing sample size, diversifying geological studies, increasing the number of common mutations and using other techniques for thalassemia.”

“Major limitations of the present study are small sample size, number of mutations and technique selected for the study. 

All these closing statements posit the same type of research gaps. You can use these to prepare your thesis statement. Take a look at the one. 

“Identifying common Beta-thalassemia mutations by DNA sequencing from south India.”

Where to find a literature gap? 

Some research clearly indicates gaps in their studies whereas some don’t. And that’s why it’s difficult for students to discover one. Notedly, by looking into variables used in the study, gaps can be recognized.

• Samples- size, types, collection method, transportation conditions. 
• Research technique- single, two or multiple; significance, efficiency and accuracy of the techniques used. 
• Geological location and condition of the study conducted. 
• Objectives selected for the study.
• Data obtained and research discussions. 

You have to read tons of literature to actually determine possible gaps in the research. A research gap has been indicated in the conclusion section, final interpretation, future direction or suggestions part of a research paper. 

Besides, when you came across some phrases used in the literature such as, 

The present study has not been covered…..

………… excluded from the present study. 

………… is important to address in future research. 

…………. Techniques can be fruitful for future research. 

……………. have/has not been studied/ reported/ evaluated in the present study. 

Keep in mind that this indicates a gap, problem or scopes of improvement in the study. 

Read more: Which factors decide a PhD Salary?

How to find a research gap?

As I said, it’s not an easy process to find a problem or gap in the research, though by following some steps that I will mention here, you can find one and can go with it. 

Select a topic that you like and that motivates you: 

Research interest is important because you have to do the same work for at least 4 to 5 years. Research takes a tremendous amount of physical, mental, economical and intellectual effort. Meaning you have to select a topic that likely motivates you. You should not get tired of doing that! 

Find lucrative keywords to go ahead: 

You can’t go through the whole topic or subject, right! you have to select one or a few. Means, make things more narrow. Take a look at the process, I have explained with an example. 

Find a keyword that is relevant to the topic you like or are interested in and go ahead with it. 

Find relevant resources and literature: 

Now next in the process, type your keyword or group of keywords in the Google search box and try identifying literature, reviews and research associated with it. 

Find reviews, read them and try to find gaps in studies. Keep in mind that it will remain in your interest circle. 

Read peer-reviewed articles and find gaps in the research: 

Try to read every fresh research and review article around your topic, go through the technique and sample collection process used in each research and discover discordance or space there. 

You can make a comparative analysis table as well. Take a look at the table below, 

When you make a comparative analysis of a few studies you will get an idea about the research gap, gap in sample collection, scope to use other techniques, improvisation or new research areas to include in the study. 

Choosing one from many: 

When you complete the process, you may find many unanswered questions or research gaps (if you have done things in this manner) and you get stuck with many, which to choose and which to leave. 

For PhD, it’s important to weightage a research work accurately; not more, not less. An imbalance will create an unnecessary burden and create problems in the future. 

Henceforth, prioritizing and narrowing down the research gap is crucial. 

In this case, you can take your supervisor’s help. Postulate an amazing research question that would be suitable for PhD, as per your interest, under your budget and fulfill your supervisor’s need. 

Expected outcomes: 

This is confusing for you surely! 

You may wonder by only identifying a gap and postulating a research question, how can we expect anything as outcomes? 

Expected outcomes of the research have significant value and importance in the PhD, PhD research proposal and your final report. You or your guide has to explain the possible results of the study. 

It’s mandatory and will give you direction for research. Expected outcomes can be considered as a path on which you will have to walk. 

Take an example of the research question we just postulated, “Identifying common Beta-thalassemia mutations by DNA sequencing from south India.”

What will be the expected results? 

• You will get some common mutations. 
• You will probably get some new mutations or variations. 
• Or you will get nothing, which means, no mutations in any samples. 

In either case, you have definite outcomes, and your final results will be around it, perhaps. You will definitely not get any information regarding the globin protein because that’s not included in the study. 

Right! 

You are just doing mutational analysis and want to find some common mutations in the selected population. So what research gap you will identify will surely give some expected outcomes. 

Wrapping up: 

Research gap/ knowledge gap or literature gap all terms leads us to the same direction and help us to propose a research question. Although as we said, expected outcomes are also an important consideration to fill the gap. 

If you are new to PhD or just started this article is the best place for you to start, and will definitely assist you to find a mission piece of link in the research. 

I hope you like this article. Please do visit other articles on this blog. 

Dr. Tushar Chauhan is a Scientist, Blogger and Scientific-writer. He has completed PhD in Genetics. Dr. Chauhan is a PhD coach and tutor.

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How to identify research gaps

Anthony Newman

About this video

Researching is an ongoing task, as it requires you to think of something nobody else has thought of before. This is where the research gap comes into play.

We will explain what a research gap is, provide you with steps on how to identify these research gaps, as well as provide you several tools that can help you identify them.

About the presenter

Senior Publisher, Life Sciences, Elsevier

Anthony Newman is a Senior Publisher with Elsevier and is based in Amsterdam. Each year he presents numerous Author Workshops and other similar trainings worldwide. He is currently responsible for fifteen biochemistry and laboratory medicine journals, he joined Elsevier over thirty years ago and has been Publisher for more than twenty of those years. Before then he was the marketing communications manager for the biochemistry journals of Elsevier.  By training he is a polymer chemist and was active in the surface coating industry before leaving London and moving to Amsterdam in 1987 to join Elsevier.

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How to Find a Research Gap

Last Updated: February 16, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by wikiHow staff writer, Danielle Blinka, MA, MPA . Danielle Blinka is a Writer, Editor, Podcaster, Improv Performer, and Artist currently living in Houston, TX. She also has experience teaching English and writing to others. Danielle holds a Bachelor of Arts in English, Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, Master of Arts in English with a concentration in writing, and Master of Public Administration from Lamar University. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 33,154 times. Learn more...

Do you want to contribute original research and make an impact in your field? If so, it's important to look for research gaps, or areas of study that are either under-researched or currently unexplored. In this article, we'll explain in detail the best way to identify a research gap—by performing a comprehensive literature review—so you can dive deep into your research topic and analyze articles critically and effectively. For more tips and tricks on identifying potential research gaps and how to proceed when you find one, read on.

Researching Your Topic

• If you start with a narrow topic, you may struggle to find a gap in research, since you’ll be focused on fewer avenues of study.
• For instance, a broad topic for social sciences research might be "organizational development" or "human motivation." For urban planning, a broad topic might be "walkable cities" or "traffic management."

• While you can't include sources like Wikipedia and news websites on your literature review, it's okay to read them to get an overview of your topic and recent developments in your field.
• It’s okay to narrow your topic as you learn more about it. However, keep your options open until you’re sure you’ve found an area with gaps in research.
• Let's say you were researching human motivation. You might use search terms like "motivating workers," "goal setting," and "improving worker productivity."

• Your research needs to be very thorough to ensure that you’re actually finding a gap. If you only read a handful of articles, you may be missing other existing research that answers your proposed research question.

Tip: Look for both quantitative and qualitative research, if applicable to your field. This will give you a broader overview of the current research.

• Ask them questions like, “Which areas of research are hot right now?” “What kinds of changes are happening within the field?” “What possible avenues of research do you see?” or “Do you think this topic is a good fit for me?”

Analyzing the Literature

• If you decide an article is unhelpful, it’s okay to skip the second reading.

Tip: Conducting a literature review is often a very time-consuming task. However, it’s also an essential part of identifying a research gap. Additionally, you can use the notes you take during your literature review when it comes time to write your article, thesis, or dissertation.

• As an example, an author might identify their gap in research with a statement like: “This subject has not been previously studied,” or “This question remains unanswered.”

• If you keep your notes in a separate document, make sure you label them with the title of the article and the author’s name. This way you won’t accidentally get your notes mixed up.

• Save any questions that you can’t answer because they may be a starting point for writing a research question.

• For instance, you might make a research gap table in a spreadsheet. Create 3 columns and label them “Author,” “Year,” and "Summary." For each article, list the authors, year of publication, and a bullet point summary of the article contents.
• Similarly, you may make a Venn diagram to compare 1 or more articles. Look for overlapping themes and methods, as well as differences between the articles.

Using Current Research, Key Concepts, or Trends

• Keep in mind that other researchers may have addressed the gaps identified in a particular article since that article was written. However, this can give you a starting point for finding a potential gap.

• Don’t rely solely on these types of papers when conducting your research. However, they can make a great supplement.

• Some journals will even tell you how many articles are pertaining to that key concept. If you see a key concept that has fewer articles than the others, that might be a good avenue for further research because it’s been studied less.

• You can access Google trends here: https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US
• For instance, if you look up "organizational development" on Google trends, you'll see that people are looking for information on management development, mission statements, and software framework.

Expert Q&A

• Reading Wikipedia articles related to your topic of study may help you identify a gap in research, though you can’t use those articles as sources. Look for areas where more citations are needed, unanswered questions, or sections that are underdeveloped.

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://libanswers.snhu.edu/faq/264001
• ↑ https://resources.nu.edu/researchprocess/literaturegap
• ↑ https://guides.umd.umich.edu/c.php?g=529423&p=3621573
• ↑ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK62480/

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Library Guide to Capstone Literature Reviews: Find a Research Gap

Find a research gap: tips to get started.

Finding a research gap is not an easy process and there is no one linear path. These tips and suggestions are just examples of possible ways to begin. 

In Ph.D. dissertations, students identify a gap in research. In other programs, students identify a gap in practice. The literature review for a gap in practice will show the context of the problem and the current state of the research. 

Research gap definition

A research gap exists when:

• a question or problem has not been answered by existing studies/research in the field 
• a concept or new idea has not been studied at all
• all the existing literature on a topic is outdated 
• a specific population/location/age group etc has not been studied 

A research gap should be:

• grounded in the literature
• amenable to scientific study
• Litmus Test for a Doctoral-Level Research Problem (Word) This tool helps students determine if they have identified a doctoral level research problem.

Identify a research gap

To find a gap you must become very familiar with a particular field of study. This will involve a lot of research and reading, because a gap is defined by what does (and does not) surround it.

• Search the research literature and dissertations (search all university dissertations, not just Walden!).
• Understand your topic! Review background information in books and encyclopedias . 
• Look for literature reviews, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses.
• Take notes on concepts, themes, and subject terms . 
• Look closely at each article's limitations, conclusions, and recommendations for future research. 
• Organize, analyze, and repeat! 

• Quick Answer: How do I find dissertations on a topic?

Start with broad searches

Use the Library Search (formerly Thoreau)  to do a broad search with just one concept at a time . Broad searches give you an idea of the academic conversation surrounding your topic.

• Try the terms you know (keywords) first.
• Look at the Subject Terms (controlled language) to brainstorm terms. 
• Subject terms help you understand what terms are most used, and what other terms to try.
• No matter what your topic is, not every researcher will be using the same terms. Keep an eye open for additional ways to describe your topic.
• Guide: Subject Terms & Index Searches: Index Overview

Keep a list of terms

• Create a list of terms
• Example list of terms

This list will be a record of what terms are: 

• related to or represent your topic
• synonyms or antonyms
• more or less commonly used
• keywords (natural language) or subject terms (controlled language)
• Synonyms & antonyms (database search skills)
• Turn keywords into subject terms

Term I started with:

culturally aware 

Subject terms I discovered:

cultural awareness (SU) 

cultural sensitivity (SU) 

cultural competence (SU) 

Search with different combinations of terms

• Combine search terms list
• Combine search terms table
• Video: Search by Themes

Since a research gap is defined by the absence of research on a topic, you will search for articles on everything that relates to your topic. 

• List out all the themes related to your gap.
• Search different combinations of the themes as you discover them (include search by theme video at bottom) 

For example, suppose your research gap is on the work-life balance of tenured and tenure-track women in engineering professions. In that case, you might try searching different combinations of concepts, such as: 

• women and STEM 
• STEM or science or technology or engineering or mathematics
• female engineering professors 
• tenure-track women in STEM
• work-life balance and women in STEM
• work-life balance and women professors
• work-life balance and tenure 

Topic adapted from one of the award winning Walden dissertations. 

• Walden University Award Winning Dissertations
• Gossage, Lily Giang-Tien, "Work-Life Balance of Tenured and Tenure-Track Women Engineering Professors" (2019). Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies. 6435.

Break your topic into themes and try combining the terms from different themes in different ways. For example: 

Theme 1 and Theme 4

Theme 2 and Theme 1

Theme 3 and Theme 4

Video: Search by Themes (YouTube)

(2 min 40 sec) Recorded April 2014 Transcript

Track where more research is needed

Most research articles will identify where more research is needed. To identify research trends, use the literature review matrix to track where further research is needed. 

• Download or create your own Literature Review Matrix (examples in links below).
• Do some general database searches on broad topics.
• Find an article that looks interesting.
• When you read the article, pay attention to the conclusions and limitations sections.
• Use the Literature Review Matrix to track where  'more research is needed' or 'further research needed'. NOTE:  you might need to add a column to the template.
• As you fill in the matrix you should see trends where more research is needed.

There is no consistent section in research articles where the authors identify where more research is needed. Pay attention to these sections: 

• limitations
• conclusions
• recommendations for future research 
• Literature Review Matrix Templates: learn how to keep a record of what you have read
• Literature Review Matrix (Excel) with color coding Sample template for organizing and synthesizing your research
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How to Identify a Research Gap

• 5-minute read
• 10th January 2024

If you’ve been tasked with producing a thesis or dissertation, one of your first steps will be identifying a research gap. Although finding a research gap may sound daunting, don’t fret! In this post, we will define a research gap, discuss its importance, and offer a step-by-step guide that will provide you with the essential know-how to complete this critical step and move on to the rest of your research project.

What Is a Research Gap?

Simply put, a research gap is an area that hasn’t been explored in the existing literature. This could be an unexplored population, an untested method, or a condition that hasn’t been investigated yet. 

Why Is Identifying a Research Gap Important?

Identifying a research gap is a foundational step in the research process. It ensures that your research is significant and has the ability to advance knowledge within a specific area. It also helps you align your work with the current needs and challenges of your field. Identifying a research gap has many potential benefits.

1. Avoid Redundancy in Your Research

Understanding the existing literature helps researchers avoid duplication. This means you can steer clear of topics that have already been extensively studied. This ensures your work is novel and contributes something new to the field.

2. Guide the Research Design

Identifying a research gap helps shape your research design and questions. You can tailor your studies to specifically address the identified gap. This ensures that your work directly contributes to filling the void in knowledge.

3. Practical Applications

Research that addresses a gap is more likely to have practical applications and contributions. Whether in academia, industry, or policymaking, research that fills a gap in knowledge is often more applicable and can inform decision-making and practices in real-world contexts.

4. Field Advancements

Addressing a research gap can lead to advancements in the field . It may result in the development of new theories, methodologies, or technologies that push the boundaries of current understanding.

5. Strategic Research Planning

Identifying a research gap is crucial for strategic planning . It helps researchers and institutions prioritize areas that need attention so they can allocate resources effectively. This ensures that efforts are directed toward the most critical gaps in knowledge.

6. Academic and Professional Recognition

Researchers who successfully address significant research gaps often receive peer recognition within their academic and professional communities. This recognition can lead to opportunities for collaboration, funding, and career advancement.

How Do I Identify a Research Gap?

1. clearly define your research topic .

Begin by clearly defining your research topic. A well-scoped topic serves as the foundation for your studies. Make sure it’s not too broad or too narrow; striking the right balance will make it easier to identify gaps in existing literature.

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2. Conduct a Thorough Literature Review

A comprehensive literature review is a vital step in any research. Dive deep into the existing research related to your topic. Look for patterns, recurring themes, and consensus among scholars. Pay attention to areas where conflicting opinions or gaps in understanding emerge.

3. Evaluate Existing Studies

Critically evaluate the studies you encounter during your literature review. Assess the paradigms , methodologies, findings, and limitations of each. Note any discrepancies, unanswered questions, or areas where further investigation is warranted. These are potential indicators of research gaps.

4. Identify Unexplored Perspectives

Consider the perspectives presented in the existing literature. Are there alternative viewpoints or marginalized voices that haven’t been adequately explored? Identifying and incorporating diverse perspectives can often lead to uncharted territory and help you pinpoint a unique research gap.

Additional Tips

Stay up to date with emerging trends.

The field of research is dynamic, with new developments and emerging trends constantly shaping the landscape. Stay up to date with the latest publications, conferences, and discussions in your field and make sure to regularly check relevant academic search engines . Often, identifying a research gap involves being at the forefront of current debates and discussions.

Seek Guidance From Experts

Don’t hesitate to reach out to experts in your field for guidance. Attend conferences, workshops, or seminars where you can interact with seasoned researchers. Their insights and experience can provide valuable perspectives on potential research gaps that you may have overlooked. You can also seek advice from your academic advisor .

Use Research Tools and Analytics

Leverage tech tools to analyze patterns and trends in the existing literature. Tools like citation analysis, keyword mapping, and data visualization can help you identify gaps and areas with limited exploration.

Identifying a research gap is a skill that evolves with experience and dedication. By defining your research topic, meticulously navigating the existing literature, critically evaluating studies, and recognizing unexplored perspectives, you’ll be on your way to identifying a research gap that will serve as the foundation for your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

If you need any help with proofreading your research paper , we can help with our research paper editing services . You can even try a sample of our services for free . Good luck with all your research!

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From research discovery to gap finding

ResGap is an application that helps you identify research gaps quickly and easily, specifically it:

• Provides a quick and comprehensive overview of your research topic.
• Finds the most cited publications, authors, journals and refereed outlets in your research area.
• Visualises how topics in your area have evolved over time, showing topics that have increased or decreased in appearance.
• Identifies research gaps by comparing different sets of literature (i.e. academic vs practitioner publications).

ResGap showcases research where the application was used:

ResGap showcases research conducted in a variety of research areas with diverse collaborators across the globe. This research applies the ResGap tool and associated methodologies, e.g. entity-linking, machine learning, text mining, natural language processing, etc.

Browse examples below:

• environmental accounting
• interdisciplinary research maps
• digital disruption and digital transformation
• trending topics in the top Information System journals from 1996 to 2017

Follow the ResGap blog for current updates.

Researchers

Whether you are a senior researcher or are just embarking on an academic career, ResGap can speed up your data analysis for literature reviews.

ResGap can help you to identify, for example:

• which are the most important topics within an area of study
• how research trends evolve over time
• which topics are being explored extensively, and which are possibly being overlooked
• which are the “hot” topics for top journals

Institutions

ResGap helps organisations determine where new research should be focused. The tool helps identify gaps and helps build a case for the development or expansion of research centres or departments.

Curricula are continuously evolving and must reflect the most up to date research. ResGap can highlight trends in the relevant literature, helping to identify learning objectives which may be overlooked or inadequately covered in course materials. As a ResGap user, you will have access to a bank of data covering 6,000+ published articles (from 1999 to 2017), enabling you to track the progression & popularity of published topics, which should inform curriculum development.

Empower your academic work and research with an automated, intelligent and efficient assistant which can help you identify relevant research gaps.

With ResGap you can simply, efficiently and reliably identify research trends, finding which topics in your area of interest are salient, emergent or waning. Efficiently comparing literature at scale while drawing reliable conclusions which assist you in your academic research, ResGap can help you uncover unmet research needs and more.

Our portal shows research trends of topics appearing in Information Systems journals (basket of 8). ResGap consolidates and groups data on over 6,000 actual publications (from 1996 until 2017). This data is then be used to generate a range of accessible graphics and models, allowing you to track the most important topics within your area of study over time.

Once signed into ResGap, you will also have access to a literature-comparison tool which was developed to identify gaps in different sets of literature and offers a wide variety of applications and features.

Dr. Mauricio Marrone – Founder

An Associate Professor at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) with interests in Information Systems, Research Methods, Innovation Diffusion and Text Analytics, Mauricio originally developed ResGap as a means to identify gaps in the research in his field. It soon became apparent that the portal had broader applications.

Tim Chard – Developer

Assoc. prof. mark dras – advisor, yvonne black – outreach manager.

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Gender disparities persist in entrepreneurship and statistics reveal the severity of the issue. Globally, only one in three businesses is owned by women . In 2019, the share of startups with at least one female founding member was a mere 20% .

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Changing partisan coalitions in a politically divided nation, party identification among registered voters, 1994-2023.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to explore partisan identification among U.S. registered voters across major demographic groups and how voters’ partisan affiliation has shifted over time. It also explores the changing composition of voters overall and the partisan coalitions.

For this analysis, we used annual totals of data from Pew Research Center telephone surveys (1994-2018) and online surveys (2019-2023) among registered voters. All telephone survey data was adjusted to account for differences in how people respond to surveys on the telephone compared with online surveys (refer to Appendix A for details).

All online survey data is from the Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel . The surveys were conducted in both English and Spanish. Each survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, age, education, race and ethnicity and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology , as well as how Pew Research Center measures many of the demographic categories used in this report .

The contours of the 2024 political landscape are the result of long-standing patterns of partisanship, combined with the profound demographic changes that have reshaped the United States over the past three decades.

Many of the factors long associated with voters’ partisanship remain firmly in place. For decades, gender, race and ethnicity, and religious affiliation have been important dividing lines in politics. This continues to be the case today.

Yet there also have been profound changes – in some cases as a result of demographic change, in others because of dramatic shifts in the partisan allegiances of key groups.

The combined effects of change and continuity have left the country’s two major parties at virtual parity: About half of registered voters (49%) identify as Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party, while 48% identify as Republicans or lean Republican.

In recent decades, neither party has had a sizable advantage, but the Democratic Party has lost the edge it maintained from 2017 to 2021. (Explore this further in Chapter 1 . )

Pew Research Center’s comprehensive analysis of party identification among registered voters – based on hundreds of thousands of interviews conducted over the past three decades – tracks the changes in the country and the parties since 1994. Among the major findings:

The partisan coalitions are increasingly different. Both parties are more racially and ethnically diverse than in the past. However, this has had a far greater impact on the composition of the Democratic Party than the Republican Party.

The share of voters who are Hispanic has roughly tripled since the mid-1990s; the share who are Asian has increased sixfold over the same period. Today, 44% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters are Hispanic, Black, Asian, another race or multiracial, compared with 20% of Republicans and Republican leaners. However, the Democratic Party’s advantages among Black and Hispanic voters, in particular, have narrowed somewhat in recent years. (Explore this further in Chapter 8 .)

Education and partisanship: The share of voters with a four-year bachelor’s degree keeps increasing, reaching 40% in 2023. And the gap in partisanship between voters with and without a college degree continues to grow, especially among White voters. More than six-in-ten White voters who do not have a four-year degree (63%) associate with the Republican Party, which is up substantially over the past 15 years. White college graduates are closely divided; this was not the case in the 1990s and early 2000s, when they mostly aligned with the GOP. (Explore this further in Chapter 2 .)

Beyond the gender gap: By a modest margin, women voters continue to align with the Democratic Party (by 51% to 44%), while nearly the reverse is true among men (52% align with the Republican Party, 46% with the Democratic Party). The gender gap is about as wide among married men and women. The gap is wider among men and women who have never married; while both groups are majority Democratic, 37% of never-married men identify as Republicans or lean toward the GOP, compared with 24% of never-married women. (Explore this further in Chapter 3 .)

A divide between old and young: Today, each younger age cohort is somewhat more Democratic-oriented than the one before it. The youngest voters (those ages 18 to 24) align with the Democrats by nearly two-to-one (66% to 34% Republican or lean GOP); majorities of older voters (those in their mid-60s and older) identify as Republicans or lean Republican. While there have been wide age divides in American politics over the last two decades, this wasn’t always the case; in the 1990s there were only very modest age differences in partisanship. (Explore this further in Chapter 4 .)

Education and family income: Voters without a college degree differ substantially by income in their party affiliation. Those with middle, upper-middle and upper family incomes tend to align with the GOP. A majority with lower and lower-middle incomes identify as Democrats or lean Democratic. There are no meaningful differences in partisanship among voters with at least a four-year bachelor’s degree; across income categories, majorities of college graduate voters align with the Democratic Party. (Explore this further in Chapter 6 .)

Rural voters move toward the GOP, while the suburbs remain divided: In 2008, when Barack Obama sought his first term as president, voters in rural counties were evenly split in their partisan loyalties. Today, Republicans hold a 25 percentage point advantage among rural residents (60% to 35%). There has been less change among voters in urban counties, who are mostly Democratic by a nearly identical margin (60% to 37%). The suburbs – perennially a political battleground – remain about evenly divided. (Explore this further in Chapter 7 . )

Growing differences among religious groups: Mirroring movement in the population overall, the share of voters who are religiously unaffiliated has grown dramatically over the past 15 years. These voters, who have long aligned with the Democratic Party, have become even more Democratic over time: Today 70% identify as Democrats or lean Democratic. In contrast, Republicans have made gains among several groups of religiously affiliated voters, particularly White Catholics and White evangelical Protestants. White evangelical Protestants now align with the Republican Party by about a 70-point margin (85% to 14%). (Explore this further in Chapter 5 .)

What this report tells us – and what it doesn’t

In most cases, the partisan allegiances of voters do not change a great deal from year to year. Yet as this study shows, the long-term shifts in party identification are substantial and say a great deal about how the country – and its political parties – have changed since the 1990s.

The steadily growing alignment between demographics and partisanship reveals an important aspect of steadily growing partisan polarization. Republicans and Democrats do not just hold different beliefs and opinions about major issues , they are much more different racially, ethnically, geographically and in educational attainment than they used to be.

Yet over this period, there have been only modest shifts in overall partisan identification. Voters remain evenly divided, even as the two parties have grown further apart. The continuing close division in partisan identification among voters is consistent with the relatively narrow margins in the popular votes in most national elections over the past three decades.

Partisan identification provides a broad portrait of voters’ affinities and loyalties. But while it is indicative of voters’ preferences, it does not perfectly predict how people intend to vote in elections, or whether they will vote. In the coming months, Pew Research Center will release reports analyzing voters’ preferences in the presidential election, their engagement with the election and the factors behind candidate support.

Next year, we will release a detailed study of the 2024 election, based on validated voters from the Center’s American Trends Panel. It will examine the demographic composition and vote choices of the 2024 electorate and will provide comparisons to the 2020 and 2016 validated voter studies.

The partisan identification study is based on annual totals from surveys conducted on the Center’s American Trends Panel from 2019 to 2023 and telephone surveys conducted from 1994 to 2018. The survey data was adjusted to account for differences in how the surveys were conducted. For more information, refer to Appendix A .

Previous Pew Research Center analyses of voters’ party identification relied on telephone survey data. This report, for the first time, combines data collected in telephone surveys with data from online surveys conducted on the Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel.

Directly comparing answers from online and telephone surveys is complex because there are differences in how questions are asked of respondents and in how respondents answer those questions. Together these differences are known as “mode effects.”

As a result of mode effects, it was necessary to adjust telephone trends for leaned party identification in order to allow for direct comparisons over time.

In this report, telephone survey data from 1994 to 2018 is adjusted to align it with online survey responses. In 2014, Pew Research Center randomly assigned respondents to answer a survey by telephone or online. The party identification data from this survey was used to calculate an adjustment for differences between survey mode, which is applied to all telephone survey data in this report.

Please refer to Appendix A for more details.

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Table of contents, behind biden’s 2020 victory, a voter data resource: detailed demographic tables about verified voters in 2016, 2018, what the 2020 electorate looks like by party, race and ethnicity, age, education and religion, interactive map: the changing racial and ethnic makeup of the u.s. electorate, in changing u.s. electorate, race and education remain stark dividing lines, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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What Researchers Discovered When They Sent 80,000 Fake Résumés to U.S. Jobs

Some companies discriminated against Black applicants much more than others, and H.R. practices made a big difference.

By Claire Cain Miller and Josh Katz

A group of economists recently performed an experiment on around 100 of the largest companies in the country, applying for jobs using made-up résumés with equivalent qualifications but different personal characteristics. They changed applicants’ names to suggest that they were white or Black, and male or female — Latisha or Amy, Lamar or Adam.

On Monday, they released the names of the companies . On average, they found, employers contacted the presumed white applicants 9.5 percent more often than the presumed Black applicants.

Yet this practice varied significantly by firm and industry. One-fifth of the companies — many of them retailers or car dealers — were responsible for nearly half of the gap in callbacks to white and Black applicants.

Two companies favored white applicants over Black applicants significantly more than others. They were AutoNation, a used car retailer, which contacted presumed white applicants 43 percent more often, and Genuine Parts Company, which sells auto parts including under the NAPA brand, and called presumed white candidates 33 percent more often.

In a statement, Heather Ross, a spokeswoman for Genuine Parts, said, “We are always evaluating our practices to ensure inclusivity and break down barriers, and we will continue to do so.” AutoNation did not respond to a request for comment.

Companies With the Largest and Smallest Racial Contact Gaps

Of the 97 companies in the experiment, two stood out as contacting presumed white job applicants significantly more often than presumed Black ones. At 14 companies, there was little or no difference in how often they called back the presumed white or Black applicants.

Source: Patrick Kline, Evan K. Rose and Christopher R. Walters

Known as an audit study , the experiment was the largest of its kind in the United States: The researchers sent 80,000 résumés to 10,000 jobs from 2019 to 2021. The results demonstrate how entrenched employment discrimination is in parts of the U.S. labor market — and the extent to which Black workers start behind in certain industries.

“I am not in the least bit surprised,” said Daiquiri Steele, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama School of Law who previously worked for the Department of Labor on employment discrimination. “If you’re having trouble breaking in, the biggest issue is the ripple effect it has. It affects your wages and the economy of your community going forward.”

Some companies showed no difference in how they treated applications from people assumed to be white or Black. Their human resources practices — and one policy in particular (more on that later) — offer guidance for how companies can avoid biased decisions in the hiring process.

A lack of racial bias was more common in certain industries: food stores, including Kroger; food products, including Mondelez; freight and transport, including FedEx and Ryder; and wholesale, including Sysco and McLane Company.

“We want to bring people’s attention not only to the fact that racism is real, sexism is real, some are discriminating, but also that it’s possible to do better, and there’s something to be learned from those that have been doing a good job,” said Patrick Kline, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who conducted the study with Evan K. Rose at the University of Chicago and Christopher R. Walters at Berkeley.

The researchers first published details of their experiment in 2021, but without naming the companies. The new paper, which is set to run in the American Economic Review, names the companies and explains the methodology developed to group them by their performance, while accounting for statistical noise.

Sample Résumés From the Experiment

Fictitious résumés sent to large U.S. companies revealed a preference, on average, for candidates whose names suggested that they were white.

To assign names, the researchers started with a prior list that had been assembled using Massachusetts birth certificates from 1974 to 1979. They then supplemented this list with names found in a database of speeding tickets issued in North Carolina between 2006 and 2018, classifying a name as “distinctive” if more than 90 percent of people with that name were of a particular race.

The study includes 97 firms. The jobs the researchers applied to were entry level, not requiring a college degree or substantial work experience. In addition to race and gender, the researchers tested other characteristics protected by law , like age and sexual orientation.

They sent up to 1,000 applications to each company, applying for as many as 125 jobs per company in locations nationwide, to try to uncover patterns in companies’ operations versus isolated instances. Then they tracked whether the employer contacted the applicant within 30 days.

A bias against Black names

Companies requiring lots of interaction with customers, like sales and retail, particularly in the auto sector, were most likely to show a preference for applicants presumed to be white. This was true even when applying for positions at those firms that didn’t involve customer interaction, suggesting that discriminatory practices were baked in to corporate culture or H.R. practices, the researchers said.

Still, there were exceptions — some of the companies exhibiting the least bias were retailers, like Lowe’s and Target.

The study may underestimate the rate of discrimination against Black applicants in the labor market as a whole because it tested large companies, which tend to discriminate less, said Lincoln Quillian, a sociologist at Northwestern who analyzes audit studies. It did not include names intended to represent Latino or Asian American applicants, but other research suggests that they are also contacted less than white applicants, though they face less discrimination than Black applicants.

The experiment ended in 2021, and some of the companies involved might have changed their practices since. Still, a review of all available audit studies found that discrimination against Black applicants had not changed in three decades. After the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, such discrimination was found to have disappeared among certain employers, but the researchers behind that study said the effect was most likely short-lived.

Gender, age and L.G.B.T.Q. status

On average, companies did not treat male and female applicants differently. This aligns with other research showing that gender discrimination against women is rare in entry-level jobs, and starts later in careers.

However, when companies did favor men (especially in manufacturing) or women (mostly at apparel stores), the biases were much larger than for race. Builders FirstSource contacted presumed male applicants more than twice as often as female ones. Ascena, which owns brands like Ann Taylor, contacted women 66 percent more than men.

Neither company responded to requests for comment.

The consequences of being female differed by race. The differences were small, but being female was a slight benefit for white applicants, and a slight penalty for Black applicants.

The researchers also tested several other characteristics protected by law, with a smaller number of résumés. They found there was a small penalty for being over 40.

Overall, they found no penalty for using nonbinary pronouns. Being gay, as indicated by including membership in an L.G.B.T.Q. club on the résumé, resulted in a slight penalty for white applicants, but benefited Black applicants — although the effect was small, when this was on their résumés, the racial penalty disappeared.

Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination is illegal even if it’s unintentional . Yet in the real world, it is difficult for job applicants to know why they did not hear back from a company.

“These practices are particularly challenging to address because applicants often do not know whether they are being discriminated against in the hiring process,” Brandalyn Bickner, a spokeswoman for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said in a statement. (It has seen the data and spoken with the researchers, though it could not use an academic study as the basis for an investigation, she said.)

What companies can do to reduce discrimination

Several common measures — like employing a chief diversity officer, offering diversity training or having a diverse board — were not correlated with decreased discrimination in entry-level hiring, the researchers found.

But one thing strongly predicted less discrimination: a centralized H.R. operation.

The researchers recorded the voice mail messages that the fake applicants received. When a company’s calls came from fewer individual phone numbers, suggesting that they were originating from a central office, there tended to be less bias . When they came from individual hiring managers at local stores or warehouses, there was more. These messages often sounded frantic and informal, asking if an applicant could start the next day, for example.

“That’s when implicit biases kick in,” Professor Kline said. A more formalized hiring process helps overcome this, he said: “Just thinking about things, which steps to take, having to run something by someone for approval, can be quite important in mitigating bias.”

At Sysco, a wholesale restaurant food distributor, which showed no racial bias in the study, a centralized recruitment team reviews résumés and decides whom to call. “Consistency in how we review candidates, with a focus on the requirements of the position, is key,” said Ron Phillips, Sysco’s chief human resources officer. “It lessens the opportunity for personal viewpoints to rise in the process.”

Another important factor is diversity among the people hiring, said Paula Hubbard, the chief human resources officer at McLane Company. It procures, stores and delivers products for large chains like Walmart, and showed no racial bias in the study. Around 40 percent of the company’s recruiters are people of color, and 60 percent are women.

Diversifying the pool of people who apply also helps, H.R. officials said. McLane goes to events for women in trucking and puts up billboards in Spanish.

So does hiring based on skills, versus degrees . While McLane used to require a college degree for many roles, it changed that practice after determining that specific skills mattered more for warehousing or driving jobs. “We now do that for all our jobs: Is there truly a degree required?” Ms. Hubbard said. “Why? Does it make sense? Is experience enough?”

Hilton, another company that showed no racial bias in the study, also stopped requiring degrees for many jobs, in 2018.

Another factor associated with less bias in hiring, the new study found, was more regulatory scrutiny — like at federal contractors, or companies with more Labor Department citations.

Finally, more profitable companies were less biased, in line with a long-held economics theory by the Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker that discrimination is bad for business. Economists said that could be because the more profitable companies benefit from a more diverse set of employees. Or it could be an indication that they had more efficient business processes, in H.R. and elsewhere.

Claire Cain Miller writes about gender, families and the future of work for The Upshot. She joined The Times in 2008 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. More about Claire Cain Miller

Josh Katz is a graphics editor for The Upshot, where he covers a range of topics involving politics, policy and culture. He is the author of “Speaking American: How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk,” a visual exploration of American regional dialects. More about Josh Katz

From The Upshot: What the Data Says

Analysis that explains politics, policy and everyday life..

Employment Discrimination: Researchers sent 80,000 fake résumés to some of the largest companies in the United States. They found that some discriminated against Black applicants much more than others .

Pandemic School Closures: ​A variety of data about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19 has accumulated since the start of the pandemic. Here is what we learned from it .

Affirmative Action: The Supreme Court effectively ended race-based preferences in admissions. But will selective schools still be able to achieve diverse student bodies? Here is how they might try .

N.Y.C. Neighborhoods: We asked New Yorkers to map their neighborhoods and to tell us what they call them . The result, while imperfect, is an extremely detailed map of the city .

Dialect Quiz:  What does the way you speak say about where you’re from? Answer these questions to find out .

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New data reveals voters are shifting to this major political party ahead of heated 2024 rematch

American voters are almost equally split as either republican or democrat, new data finds.

Wall Street Journal poll shows Biden losing support from Black men

Fox News political analyst Gianno Caldwell tells 'The Story' that the Democratic Party has taken the Black community for granted.

America is split in political party affiliation heading into the 2024 presidential election , seeing one of the most evenly split electorates in the past two decades, resurfaced research reveals.

A Pew Research Center analysis examined voter identification across different ages, races, religions and education levels, comparing how voters identified in 1996 to new data from 2023.

Fifty-one percent of Americans said they identified with the Republican Party in 1994, while 47% identified as Democrats. The tables turned over the years, with 5% more of American voters identifying as Democrats over Republicans in 2020. However, the Pew results from 2023 reveal a significant shift in party affiliation this cycle, reporting that 49% of voters identify as Democrat or leaning Democrat, while 48% identify as Republican or leaning Republican.

Additionally, about 33% of respondents said they identify as being conservative or moderate in 2023, while the other side of the aisle only sees 23% identifying as liberal Democrats or leaning liberal.  

BLACK GEORGIA VOTERS ABANDONING BIDEN SAY THEY'RE SENDING MESSAGES ON GAZA: ‘DEMOCRATS SHOULD LISTEN’

Ranked choice voting comes in multiple forms and is used in a wide variety of states and localities around the U.S. (Paul Richards)

The poll found that while Democrats remain the party of choice for most Hispanic, Black and Asian voters, party support among non-Hispanic White Democratic voters has dropped 21 percentage points since 1996, falling from 77% to 56% in 2023. 

Recent polls have found that despite their advantage, Democratic support among minority voters is shrinking. A recent Gallup poll found that 19% of Black adults said they identify as lean Republican or Republican, while 66% identify as Democrat or lean Democrat, the "smallest Gallup has recorded in its polling, dating back to 1999."

UNDECIDED BATTLEGROUND VOTERS UNANIMOUSLY BLAST BIDEN ON ECONOMY: ‘ABSOLUTELY DISASTROUS’

Among different age groups, Democrats maintain their advantage among young voters, while the majority of older individuals are Republican affiliated.

Former President Donald Trump arrives at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Georgia on Wednesday to host a campaign fundraising event. (Robin Rayne for Fox News Digital)

Republicans have gained ground among Hispanic voters in recent years, tripling affiliation with their base in the demographic over the past two decades from 3% to 9%.

Rural voters also appear to be shifting towards the GOP, with the new poll showing the party holds a 25-point advantage over Democrats, 60% to 35%, after the parties were evenly split among voters in 2008.

President Biden and former President Donald Trump are expected to compete in a presidential election rematch in November. While Biden won the 2020 election against Trump, Pew's analysis reveals a potential shift in the political landscape that could be echoed on the ballot this fall.

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Pew Research Center conducted the surveys via telephone for the results dating 1994 to 2018, and via online surveys from 2019 to 2023 among registered voters.

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Robinson KA, Saldanha IJ, Mckoy NA. Frameworks for Determining Research Gaps During Systematic Reviews [Internet]. Rockville (MD): Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (US); 2011 Jun. (Methods Future Research Needs Reports, No. 2.)

Frameworks for Determining Research Gaps During Systematic Reviews [Internet].

We utilized multiple resources and perspectives including literature review, contact with other EPCs and organizations involved with evidence synthesis, and consultation with experts at our institution to develop a framework for the identification and characterization of research gaps. This framework involves two main components – identifying explicitly why the research gap exists and characterizing the research gap using widely accepted key elements. This framework facilitates the use of a systematic method to identify research gaps.

There are important strengths to the process we used to achieve our objective. First, our process utilized multiple resources and perspectives. These included a focused literature review and consultation with twelve other EPCs, thirty-seven organizations from around the world which are involved with evidence synthesis, and two technical experts from our institution. Second, we pilot tested the use of the framework on two randomly selected AHRQ evidence reports. This pilot test did not identify any major problems with the framework but did identify the need for consistency and prior decision making on the part of investigative team members.

There are several strengths to the framework itself. First, it is based on widely accepted key elements ( PICOS ) of a well-designed research question. AHRQ also recommends that EPCs use the PICO elements during the topic refinement process. Second, the use of these elements will potentially make the process of identification of research gaps more systematic and therefore useful. Third, for each underlying reason for research gap we have provided the corresponding domain/element in three common evidence grading systems (the EPC SOE system, the GRADE system, and the USPSTF grading system). We anticipate that this will enhance the use of this framework by leveraging work already being completed. Finally, in addition to indicating where the current evidence falls short, the framework also indicates why the evidence falls short (reasons for existence of research gaps). Knowing where the gaps are and the reason(s) underlying their existence could help in the design of the appropriate research to fill them.

The worksheet is simple to use and facilitates the presentation of research gaps. It is transparent and reproducible. A proposed format for presenting research gaps is provided below.

Proposed Format for Presenting Research Gaps and Research Questions

We did not find consistency in how research gaps were presented during our audit of the evidence reports. Some reports presented these by embedding them in text while others used bullet-point lists, numbered lists, or presented as tables.

We propose that while writing the future research needs sections of evidence reports, investigative teams provide adequate details of research gaps and translate them into research questions. While translating gaps into research questions, all relevant PICOS elements should be incorporated. This would ensure that such questions are stand-alone and can be more effectively used by those designing research agendas. We propose that EPCs use the following format for presenting research gaps in evidence reports:

Reason for Gap

Population (P)

Intervention (I)

Comparison (C)

Outcomes (O)

Setting (S)

• Research Question.

Evidence reports often identify research gaps which do not relate to any specific key question. Such research gaps could be presented at the end of the future research section. We suggest use of the same format as above, but Key Question Number and Key Question Topic would be replaced by “Other Research Gaps”.

An example of presenting two research gaps and translated research questions is provided below:

Reason for Gap – biased information (randomized trials not identified)

Population (P) – women with gestational diabetes

Intervention (I) – metformin

Comparison (C) – any insulin

Outcomes (O) – neonatal hypoglycemia and NICU admissions

Settings (S) – any setting

• Research Question Number 1: What is the effectiveness of metformin compared to any insulin in reducing neonatal hypoglycemia and NICU admissions in women with gestational diabetes?

Reason for Gap – insufficient information (sample sizes in studies too small)

Population (P) – women with insulin-requiring (type A2) gestational diabetes at 40 weeks of gestation

Intervention (I) – elective labor induction

Comparison (C) – expectant management

Outcomes (O) – emergency cesarean delivery (maternal) and macrosomia (neonatal)

• Research Question Number 2: What is the effectiveness of elective labor induction compared to expectant management in preventing emergency cesarean delivery and neonatal macrosomia in women with insulin-requiring (type A2) gestational diabetes at 40 weeks of gestation?
• Limitations and Future Research

We identified limited use of formal processes, including frameworks, for identifying research gaps. This prevented us from answering subquestions 1.b. and 1.c. as we were unable to compare existing methods for identifying and presenting research gaps. Further refinement of the framework we propose, and development of other frameworks, would allow future research to assess relative usefulness of different frameworks.

A limitation of the framework that we have developed is that it does not explicitly account for the specificity of research gaps. Team members could differ in terms of the number of research gaps abstracted based on whether gaps are abstracted at the level of the key question or the subquestion. We therefore suggest that a priori decisions be made about the level of specificity that should be accomplished and that investigative teams be consistent. This decision would likely depend upon the topic of interest as well as the specific intervention and comparison. The benefit of being specific needs to be weighed against the time required and the need to identify each specific intervention and comparison of interest.

In identifying research gaps we suggest that investigative teams be consistent and decide a priori about the specificity of research gaps to be identified and presented. It is also important to be consistent and decide a priori which reason will be selected when the gap arises because only one study is identified (i.e., insufficient information or unknown consistency). While identifying reasons why a research gap exists, team members must remember to pick the main reason(s) that prevents conclusions from being made and to be as specific as possible. This would potentially help towards designing the appropriate research to fill that gap.

Our framework calls for identifying the most important reason(s) for existence of research gaps (i.e., reasons that most preclude conclusions from being made). However, there may often be more than one main reason why a research gap exists. Team members could differ on the relative importance of these reasons. Decisions on the relative importance of these reasons are often arbitrary. More research is needed to determine if a hierarchy or ranking system can be established to aid these decisions.

The application of the framework to identify research gaps by our investigative team was quite challenging. Much of this was due to our team being unfamiliar with the evidence reports and trying to retrospectively apply the framework. We suggest that the same investigative team which synthesizes the evidence apply the framework while writing the results. We also suggest that investigative teams working on evidence reports use the SOE for grading the evidence. If this is done, teams can leverage work done in preparing the table to identify research gaps.

Our pilot test relied on applying the worksheet retrospectively on existing evidence reports. Further evaluation is needed to see how the framework performs with other types of reports or questions. Evaluation is needed to determine if the gaps identified using the framework are different than those identified using current methods. This could be assessed by examining the number of gaps identified, the perceived usefulness of the gaps, as assessed by potential stakeholders (usefulness could be further defined as actionable gaps, important gaps, etc.). Future research could have other EPCs use the worksheet during the drafting of an evidence report. Another evaluation could have some members of an EPC team use the worksheet, and others not, to compare the process and outcome (i.e., future research section). Further, the format for presentation of the research gaps could be evaluated for clarity and ease of use by other EPCs as well as by other relevant stakeholders, including researchers and funders.

• Cite this Page Robinson KA, Saldanha IJ, Mckoy NA. Frameworks for Determining Research Gaps During Systematic Reviews [Internet]. Rockville (MD): Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (US); 2011 Jun. (Methods Future Research Needs Reports, No. 2.) Discussion.
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