Can a Research Gap Exist Between Disciplines Rather Than Within One?

What If the Missing Knowledge Is Hiding Between Literatures?

Researchers are often taught to find a research gap by entering a literature, reviewing what has been studied, and identifying something that remains unknown. That works for many projects. But it assumes that the relevant knowledge belongs to one recognizable scholarly conversation.

Sometimes the interesting gap appears only when you place two conversations beside each other.

One discipline may know a great deal about one part of a problem while another has developed knowledge about a related mechanism, population, outcome, or process. Both literatures can be mature. Neither necessarily contains an obvious gap on its own. What remains underdeveloped is the connection between them.

This creates an important possibility for interdisciplinary research: the missing knowledge may exist between disciplines rather than neatly inside either one.

Yes, the Missing Connection Can Be the Research Gap

A Gap Between Disciplines Is Usually a Missing Relationship

Research gaps do not have to be empty spaces

The phrase “research gap” can create the impression that you are looking for an empty box: a topic, population, variable, method, or context nobody has studied.

Interdisciplinary gaps often look different. The knowledge may already exist, but in pieces that have not been adequately connected.

For example, Discipline A may have extensive evidence that factor X affects process Y. Discipline B may have extensive evidence connecting process Y with outcome Z. Researchers in the two literatures may rarely cite one another or ask whether X is consequential for Z through Y. The potential gap lies not necessarily in X, Y, or Z individually, but in the unexamined relationship among them.

This possibility has a substantial intellectual history. Don Swanson's work on “undiscovered public knowledge” demonstrated how separately developed scientific literatures could contain complementary findings whose connection had not been explicitly recognized. His literature-based discovery work later became an established approach to finding potentially meaningful relationships across disconnected bodies of research.

A between-discipline gap can take several forms

Not all interdisciplinary gaps are the same. Identifying the type of disconnection helps clarify what the study would actually contribute.

These possibilities are more precise than saying that “few interdisciplinary studies exist.” A publication count describes scarcity. A research gap should identify what knowledge remains unresolved and why resolving it matters.

Disconnected literatures are not automatically evidence of missing knowledge

Suppose education researchers rarely cite research in marine biology. That disconnection is unsurprising and, for most educational questions, irrelevant.

Even closely neighboring disciplines can remain separate for legitimate reasons. They may study different phenomena, operate at different levels of analysis, or pursue questions that do not require one another's findings.

A low level of cross-citation therefore cannot establish an interdisciplinary research gap by itself.

First establish that the disciplines really intersect around a problem

Before searching for what lies between two fields, determine whether they are genuinely connected to the same research problem.

This requires more than spotting similar keywords. Two disciplines may use the same term differently. Conversely, they may investigate substantially overlapping phenomena using completely different vocabularies.

You therefore need to establish what each field is actually explaining. Compare its central constructs, definitions, mechanisms, outcomes, levels of analysis, and standards of evidence. This helps determine whether the disciplines are addressing the same problem from different disciplinary perspectives or merely discussing neighboring topics.

Terminology can conceal the connection

One reason interdisciplinary gaps are difficult to detect is that scholarly communities develop specialized vocabularies.

A researcher searching for “student persistence” may not retrieve literature organized around “continuance intention.” Someone searching for “AI reliance” may miss work framed through automation bias, algorithmic trust, technology dependence, or cognitive offloading. The concepts are not necessarily equivalent, but there may be enough overlap to warrant investigation.

Searching only the vocabulary of your home discipline can therefore create an artificial gap.

Before claiming that another field has neglected your problem, identify its terminology and search the problem across disciplinary vocabularies. Otherwise, what looks like a gap between fields may simply be a search strategy that never entered the second literature properly.

The most interesting gap may be an unmade inference

Swanson's classic literature-based discovery work provides a useful conceptual model. In his work on Raynaud's syndrome and fish oil, he examined bodies of medical literature that were largely disconnected bibliographically yet contained findings that, considered together, suggested a scientifically interesting relationship.

The important point is not the specific biomedical hypothesis. It is the structure of the discovery.

Later literature-based discovery research formalized and extended this idea of connecting complementary but disconnected literatures. The general lesson extends beyond biomedicine: published knowledge can be fragmented in ways that prevent an implication from becoming visible within either literature alone.

But a logical connection is not yet an empirical finding

This point is critical. If Literature A reports X–Y and Literature B reports Y–Z, you cannot automatically conclude that X causes Z.

The studies may involve different populations, settings, definitions of Y, measurement procedures, timescales, or causal structures. Y might even refer to only superficially similar constructs.

The connection should therefore be treated as a hypothesis or research opportunity requiring evaluation, not as a result already established by combining citations.

A gap can also arise from competing disciplinary explanations

Between-discipline gaps are not limited to missing connections. Sometimes two fields study the same outcome but offer different explanations for it.

Imagine that one literature explains students' reliance on generative AI mainly through individual cognitive processes, while another emphasizes institutional assessment conditions and academic norms. Both could have substantial empirical support.

The gap might then concern how these explanations interact, the conditions under which one becomes more consequential, or whether an individual-level account changes once institutional conditions are considered.

Here, the research opportunity comes from disagreement or separation between explanatory traditions rather than from a completely absent variable.

Do not assume the gap exists until you search both sides

An interdisciplinary gap claim is unusually vulnerable to incomplete searching. If you know Discipline A deeply but have sampled only a few papers from Discipline B, you may mistake your unfamiliarity for the field's silence.

Search each literature on its own terms. Identify its major reviews, theories, keywords, journals, authors, and relevant empirical traditions. Then search explicitly for intersections.

This process sometimes produces an inconvenient but scientifically useful discovery: another discipline may already have the answer your field thinks is missing. In that case, the contribution may shift from discovering the relationship to translating, testing, extending, or integrating existing knowledge.

A between-discipline gap still needs to justify interdisciplinarity

Finding disconnected literatures does not mean your resulting study must integrate entire disciplines.

The question may require only one specific concept or mechanism from another field. Alternatively, meaningful integration may require substantial expertise from both.

Ask whether the proposed research question actually requires more than one discipline. The gap should determine the necessary intellectual scope, rather than interdisciplinarity becoming an objective in itself.

Finding a Gap Between AI Trust and Feedback Literacy Research

Neither literature is empty. The education literature may explain how students interpret feedback, while the technology-oriented literature may explain how interface and system cues affect perceived credibility.

The researcher then searches for studies connecting these mechanisms specifically in AI-generated academic feedback and finds the intersection comparatively underdeveloped.

The defensible gap is not “few studies combine education and human-computer interaction.” That statement describes disciplinary composition. The substantive gap is the particular relationship that existing separated literatures do not yet explain adequately.

Common Mistakes When Claiming a Gap Between Disciplines

Describe the Missing Knowledge, Not Merely the Disciplinary Separation

If you suspect a research gap exists between disciplines, your task is to move from “these literatures rarely interact” to a precise statement of what remains unknown because they have developed separately.

A useful gap statement should survive a simple challenge: if disciplinary labels disappeared from the proposal, could you still explain what is unknown? If the answer is yes, you probably have a substantive research problem. If the gap disappears as soon as “Discipline A” and “Discipline B” are removed from the sentence, you may have identified disciplinary separation rather than missing knowledge.

Before Claiming a Research Gap Between Disciplines, Check This

Questions About Research Gaps Across Disciplines

The Missing Knowledge May Be the Connection Itself

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