Reviewers are suspicious of the sentence “no one has studied this”. Either it is false, or it suggests the topic may not matter. A credible gap shows what is known, what remains unresolved, and why that matters.
Three kinds of gap
- Evidence gap. The question has been studied, but results conflict or are thin.
- Method gap. Earlier work used methods or data that limit what can be concluded.
- Context gap. Findings exist for one setting, such as a country, sector or population, but not the one you study.
Build the gap from recent sources
Choose recent, indexed papers and set out what each established and where it stopped. A short comparison table of three to five papers often makes the gap obvious without argument.
Connect it to your objectives
Each objective in your study should answer part of the gap. If an objective has no link to it, either the objective or the gap needs to change.
A simple sentence structure
Existing work has shown X. However, Y remains unresolved because Z. This study addresses it by W.
A test before you submit
Ask a colleague in your field to read only your introduction and then tell you what the study contributes. If their answer differs from yours, the gap is not yet clear on the page.
Our Problem Statement and Base Papers services are built around exactly this step.