Dissertations and research projects

Finding the gap

When starting out on reading for your dissertation, you may feel a little overwhelmed with the amount of research out there related to your topic. This is normal!

Your first job is to start to make sense of this existing research, sketching out a map with your dissertation in the centre. Around you will be various ‘neighbourhoods’ or groups of literature that are connected in some way, perhaps by a shared theme or group of participants. You might also start to identify ‘points of interest’ - key texts, models or theories that need to be acknowledged in order for a reader to understand your approach to your research area. 

In drawing this map, your aim is to identify the research gap or problem - an issue or question that you feel has not been fully addressed by existing studies. Remember, there is no expectation that you will have read absolutely everything on your subject, but you should be able to use the wide range of sources available to you to persuade the reader of the relevance and importance of your chosen topic.

Here are a few common approaches to mapping the literature that might provide some inspiration for your own dissertation:

• Chronological, tracing change and development over time.
  Example: in a study of contemporary attitudes to tattoos, you might start by looking at historical examples of tattooing in other cultures, mapping out a timeline of key trends and shifts in the practice over time.
• Thematic, mapping out the reading around topics or themes that multiple papers have in common.
  Example: If you are investigating stress and anxiety in higher education, you might start out by searching for literature on mental health in universities to establish the 'bigger picture' before zooming in on a specific topic.
• Venn diagram, bringing together two otherwise distinct areas to find the literature that is common to both/bridges the gap.
  Example: You may be working on a topic that is well-researched (stroke patient recovery) but adopting a new angle (from your perspective as a physiotherapist). Start by reading the literature in each area separately, fitting the papers into a Venn diagram that enables you to see where the closest links or overlaps between the two areas occur.
• Context-based, where the literature is split based on which participants are involved or the geographical/cultural environment in which it was carried out.
  Example: You might be interested in how Kenyan companies address fraud and financial corruption, and start your literature search by identifying examples and case studies from other countries and regions.
• Research methods, where the literature tends to fall into different approaches to the same research problem. 
  Example: If the focus of your dissertation is to apply and test a new method, such as a machine learning algorithm, you could start by identifying if and where a similar method has been used in existing research (a bottom-up approach to literature searching).

By reading widely in the early stages of your project, you should begin to get a sense of what research has already been conducted in your area, and where you fit into this map of research. For some people, there will be a clear gap or under explored topic in the research that their dissertation will aim to tackle or solve. Other projects may be less radical, focusing more on testing the transferability of an existing concept or study.  By drawing on this existing research, you are justifying the relevance of your own dissertation project, showing how it contributes (even in small way) to research in your field.