Finding research gaps is an essential part of novel research. Identifying gaps can connect disparate fields of research and advance knowledge, as well as enable opportunities for academic growth and success.

Understanding and reviewing scientific literature is essential to spotting these gaps. Litmaps helps you find research gaps by letting you:

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What is a research gap?

How to Find Research Gaps with Litmaps

1. Prepare your literature library

2. Create a Litmap

3. Search for articles using your Litmap

4. Find disconnected literature

5. Future-proof your process

A research gap refers to any unexplored or unresolved area of research. These are "open questions".

Research gaps can also refer to a disconnections within the research, such as when researchers in different fields don't realize their work is connected. For example, different scientific domains may use different terminologies for the same concept. These gaps continue even today, because many researchers rely on keyword search, thus missing out on connections that don't match those "keywords".

Litmaps analyzes scientific literature and how it connects by using the citation network. By seeing the actual connections among articles, Litmaps let you observe how fields interact and find research gaps you'd otherwise miss.

Here's how to use Litmaps to find research gaps, by seeing where articles are and aren't connected.

First, identify your topic and relevant articles. Save these articles to a Tag in Litmaps. Here's how to import papers you have into Tag(s) in Litmaps.

You can also curate your literature library using Litmaps.

Now that you have your articles in Litmaps, we'll create a Map to visualize how your articles connect.

Your Litmap shows how your articles are connected via citations and references.

It also gives you recommendations for relevant literature. We'll go over this more in the next few steps.

Now that you've made your Map, you can use Litmaps to discover more related literature. Litmaps will use all the articles on your Map as an input to the search algorithm, and find other related articles.

Now, you'll see a list of suggested articles on your Map (and in the side-bar). Go through the suggested articles to find important literature on your topic. For each suggested article, you can see how it connects to the existing papers you already know.

You can improve your search by clicking More Like This to add an article to your Map. Then, click Refresh to re-run the search with these articles added as search inputs.

At this point, you've explored your topic and created a collection of connected articles. You may have already discovered new connections and sub-topics you didn't yet know about. However, this search has been largely limited based on connected papers. If you want to find articles you may have missed because they aren't connected at all to your existing literature, you'll need to change your search strategy.

Change the search algorithm to Similar Text in order to discover relevant literature, based on the title and abstract similarity.

You'll see a very different Litmap. This one will likely show many entirely disconnected articles. This is a great way to spot papers that fail to cite or reference any you already know.

Now you've curated a comprehensive set of papers on your topic and spotted any potential gaps in your field. The last step is to ensure your work doesn't go out-of-date.

You can re-run this search process manually at regular intervals, to see what new literature has come out. Or, automate this process by enabling "Monitor" for your Litmap. Litmaps will automatically run your search for you as new papers are published, and let you know about any new articles on your topic.