Who would decide differently if you were right?

You have a hunch from years of work. Something your field takes for granted does not match what you have seen. You mention it to an academic, and the first thing they ask is: "Where is the gap in the literature?"

That question comes too early. A hunch from practice usually starts as a doubt about something people assume. Turn it into a gap too soon and the doubt drops out, along with the reason anyone outside your field should care. Ask three questions first, in this order:

1. What does your hunch doubt?
2. Who would decide differently if you were right?
3. What does the research already say?

The gap comes last, and by then it has a reason to exist.

What does your hunch doubt? Say it the way people in your field would say it. Picture a safety manager on a mine. Everyone there believes more training means fewer incidents, yet incidents went up after the training programme doubled. The belief is "more training means fewer incidents". If you cannot put the belief into words yet, keep watching until you can.

Published research rarely starts with a doubt like this. When two organisation scholars read 52 articles from four journals, every one built its question from a gap, and none, on the page, set out to challenge what the field assumed (Sandberg & Alvesson, 2011). A recent look at 238 applied-linguistics articles found much the same: "an overwhelming majority" still went the gap route (Razavipour & Farzaneh, 2026). It is easy to see why. A gap is safe, while questioning an assumption can "upset colleagues, reviewers and editors" (Sandberg & Alvesson, 2011). The price is research that keeps building on what everyone already believes; as the same authors put it in a companion paper, gap-spotting tends not to question existing work enough (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011).

Your doubt does not have to be big. The sociologist Michael Burawoy took the old question "Why don't workers work harder?" and turned it into "Why do people work as hard as they do?" (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011). That small turn questioned a whole way of seeing work. Doubting a belief held in one school of thought, or on one mine, can be enough.

Who would decide differently if you were right? This is the test of whether the doubt matters. Health researchers make a useful distinction here. A research gap is where the evidence is not good enough for a reviewer to reach a conclusion. It becomes a research need when that gap holds up decisions "by patients, clinicians, and policy makers" (Robinson et al., 2011). Put simply, a gap is about the literature, and a need is about a decision someone cannot make. On the mine, the safety committee would spend next year's budget differently if training turned out not to be the answer. A manager, a regulator, a teacher or a patient can play the same part. If nobody would decide anything differently, the idea may still be interesting, but it will be harder to argue for.

What does the research already say? This is where reading earns its keep. Your doubt is one person's observation until it is checked. Researchers may already share it, and then your question moves on: why does the belief survive on your shafts? If they do not, you have found your gap, and you will need it, because the gap is still the most common way into proposals and theses (Thomson, 2021). Gap-spotting has its place too. Sandberg and Alvesson say it "often makes sense" where a body of research is sound, and in clinical research Robinson's team reach the need through the gap.

Here is the mine example, framed both ways.

Framed as a gap: "Little research has examined safety training and incident rates on South African platinum mines."

Framed from the three questions: "Everyone here assumes more training means fewer incidents. On our shafts, incidents rose after the training programme doubled. If training is not the answer, the safety committee would spend next year's budget differently."

Almost any study could fill the first. The second names a belief, a reason to doubt it and a decision that hangs on it. Pat Thomson (2021), who calls the stock formula "gap talk", suggests similar moves: name the assumptions a field rests on, or the need a profession has.

Skip the three questions and a good hunch usually ends up as one more study that fills a gap and changes nobody's decision. Before your next proposal, project brief or supervision meeting, write your three answers on one page. Take that page with you, and not only the gap.

References

Alvesson, M., & Sandberg, J. (2011). Generating research questions through problematization. Academy of Management Review, 36(2), 247–271. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2009.0188

Razavipour, K., & Farzaneh, N. (2026). Rethinking incrementalism in applied linguistics research. Teaching English as a Second Language Quarterly, 45(3), 23–45. https://doi.org/10.22099/tesl.2025.53836.3437

Robinson, K. A., Saldanha, I. J., & McKoy, N. A. (2011). Development of a framework to identify research gaps from systematic reviews. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 64(12), 1325–1330. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2011.06.009

Sandberg, J., & Alvesson, M. (2011). Ways of constructing research questions: Gap-spotting or problematization? Organization, 18(1), 23–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508410372151

Thomson, P. (2021, July 16). The problem with the "gap in the literature." LSE Impact Blog. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/07/16/the-problem-with-the-gap-in-the-literature