How to- the research design

Hello, Mathias continuing our section on limiting the scope of your paper. We are going to deal with the link between your gap and the research question. But before that, let’s talk more precisely about the gap. Let’s just say that during the process of literature review, you have to clearly identify the gap, but how to concretely fill it. Big deal. So you have mapped your scientific literature after laborious work of detection, reading, writing. You have depicted out the problem you want to resolve or at least make a contribution to has already been studied by the researcher in your community. Then you think it will be interesting to further the research around this question which needs more investigation. And this is what we call the gap. It’s not a matter of has it already been done. But is it possible to go further in this direction in an original way? For example, you should maybe never write that it has never been done before. Because the reviewer will tell you that maybe there was a reason or it’s just not interesting. So now you are aware of this, you must explain in your article how you can really contribute to the scientific community by filling the gap in the literature. We define it as a blank theoretical space that you really hope at least partially to fill thanks to your paper. The logical way to accomplish this after presenting your gap is to explain your objectives and how you want to fill this gap. The first step will be to present your research question. The research question of your article will be the most important sentence of your article because it will make the links between the gaps you will define and how your propose to fill it. The research question is the keystone of your paper. It is the specific question rising the context of your article. Thanks to your data and [INAUDIBLE] you’re able to produce results that internalize, will shed some light, or further the reasoning on your research question. With this analysis, you can make a theoretical conclusion and partially fill the literature gap you have identified at the beginning of the paper. We think that if you continue to find a good research question is really dependent on the discipline and the type of research you do. If you’re doing a more hypothetical deductive research with reproducible experiments, it seems easier to find and write a research question that in a purely theoretical articles or based on other kinds of methodologies. The formal aspect of the research question has to be clear, precise and concise but not too general. I know such a difficult task. We, as readers, also have to clearly identify your research question in your article. Don’t try to hide it behind complex sentence or in the middle of a big paragraph. Once again, you have to check on your own what are the formal rules used in your community or the journal you want to publish. So research question is a huge element of your article, and you have to be 100% sure that it embodies your research. If someone asks what is your article about and sum it up in a few words, the white line research question should be the answer. It should be the one sentence tracking out your paper. Thanks again, and see you on the next section.