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Research gap in marketing: how to find one worth filling

A research gap is worth filling when the missing knowledge would change what researchers or managers understand, not simply because nobody has studied it. The most productive places to look are the research agendas in review articles, the untested conditions of established regularities, maps of what a field publishes, and problems practitioners face that research has neglected. Before committing, test the gap against the criteria editors use to judge contribution.

What a research gap is, and what it is not

A research gap is missing knowledge that, once supplied, would change how a relationship is understood or managed. The absence of prior studies is not enough. In an editorial on contribution, the editor of the Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing argues that a topic nobody has examined, or the first study in a new country or industry, can still be trivial unless the author shows why it matters. What makes a gap interesting is something important but overlooked, such as an intervening variable, a boundary condition, or a way to resolve findings that contradict each other.^[1]

Corley and Gioia make a related point from management theory: hunting for the next mediator or moderator because a gap happens to exist tends to produce theory for its own sake. They argue that more useful work engages problems that matter to practice and society, and ideally anticipates questions organizations will soon face. Both pieces are expert essays rather than studies of what gets published, so read them as the judgement of experienced editors.^[2][1]

Start with review articles and research agendas

Review articles are the most efficient starting point because mapping gaps is part of their job. A Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science editorial on review papers lists what a good review does: it resolves definitional ambiguity, synthesizes current knowledge, identifies inconsistent results and their possible explanations, evaluates methods, and describes existing gaps and future directions. Read the future research section of a recent review first, then check whether later papers have already closed the gaps it names.^[3]

Agendas differ in how concrete they are. Kannan and Li restricted their review of digital marketing to marketing journals so that it would expose gaps in that literature, and they end with numbered open questions, for example whether reviews written on mobile devices differ systematically from those written on desktop computers. An agenda at that level of detail hands you a question that is almost ready to study.^[4]

Reviews also expose gaps in theory and method, not only in topics. A review of 235 B2B branding articles published between 1988 and 2025 found that rising publication volume hid limited cumulative progress: descriptive case studies dominated, and many quantitative studies tested hypotheses without strong conceptual frameworks or fell back on consumer branding models. A review of 104 key account management papers found survey-based quantitative work, qualitative cases confined to one or a few firms, a narrow set of industries, and established theories applied in isolation. A gap in method or theory can be as valuable as a gap in topic.^[5][6]

Look for untested conditions of known regularities

Established regularities are a rich source of gaps because their limits are rarely documented. When Wind and Sharp assembled 23 empirical generalizations about advertising and surveyed thought leaders about them, they found that most of these laws do not state the conditions under which they hold. Respondents named the missing conditions: competitive context, product and service category, type of media, the creative message, countries (especially emerging ones) and the economic climate. Each of these is a candidate research question.^[7]

Carrying a regularity into a genuinely different domain can also fill a gap. Wilson, Sharp, Nguyen and Bogomolova asked whether the negative binomial distribution, a model of how often consumers buy, also describes leisure-time physical activity, and found that it fitted data from Australia, the United States and Singapore well. The contribution was showing that a buying regularity holds for a behaviour that involves no purchase at all.^[8]

Whetten supplies the test for this kind of gap. Showing that an established model works as expected in a new setting teaches little on its own; it has theoretical merit only when something about the new setting gives a reason to expect the theory to fail there. Qualitatively different conditions make a stronger case than more of the same.^[9]

Map what the field publishes

Bibliometric analysis shows where publications and citations concentrate. Akpınar's analysis of eight leading marketing journals from 1996 to 2021 found that North American dominance of the discipline continues and that some articles from the start of that 26-year window are still frequently cited. A map like this shows which countries and institutions the core journals over-represent and which older works still anchor current debate.^[10]

Reference publication year spectroscopy, a method introduced by Marx, Bornmann, Barth and Leydesdorff, traces the historical roots of a field by counting how often its papers cite references from each publication year. Pronounced peaks usually point to a few particularly influential origin works. Reading those works before you claim a gap reduces the risk of rediscovering an old idea.^[11]

Counts of publications by sub-topic, such as those produced by the free research gap finder on this site, show which angles of a topic are growing and which are crowded. Treat a thin area as a hypothesis rather than a gap: few papers can mean the question is new, or that it matters to nobody.^[10][1]

Start from a problem in practice

Some of the largest gaps sit between what managers need and what academics study. Lilien notes that business-to-business transactions accounted for about 10.7 trillion dollars, nearly 42% of reported US revenues in 2010, yet B2B articles stayed rare in the leading journals: around the turn of the century only one to five a year appeared in each of three top outlets, with little change a decade later. He also found virtually no academic work on selling to governments or the military.^[12]

Lilien's agenda came from structured input: a Delphi exercise with 15 innovation academics, followed by a workshop with academics and research-oriented practitioners. The resulting questions are concrete, such as which customers a B2B firm should involve in developing new products and how to measure the value of that involvement. Wind and Sharp likewise located advertising gaps by asking practitioners and academics where they wished generalizations existed.^[12][7]

In a Journal of Marketing guest editorial, Reibstein, Day and Wind criticize the habit of starting from a new method, dataset or behavioural hypothesis and only then asking where it might apply; they recommend starting from an important problem and bringing the best mix of method, data and theory to it. Golder and colleagues make a compatible case for empirics-first research that originates in a real-world phenomenon or observation, arguing that today's data-rich environment surfaces questions that existing theory has not anticipated.^[13][14]

Check whether the gap is worth filling

Before committing months to a gap, put it through the questions editors ask. The criteria below come from editorials and essays, so they are expert judgement about review standards rather than tested predictors of acceptance.^[9][15]

• Does filling it explain why a relationship holds, not only that it exists? References, lists of variables, diagrams and hypotheses are not theory; the explanation is.^[16][9]
• Would the answer change a thoughtful reader's mind? Ideas are interesting when they challenge assumptions people hold, not merely because they are new.^[17]
• Is the novelty more than a new country, industry or famous theory? Being first in a context, or applying a well-known theory to a new field, is not a contribution unless you show why the context changes the answer.^[1][9]
• Will the result travel beyond one industry in one market? A former editor of the Journal of Marketing names lack of generalizability as the foremost reason for desk rejection there.^[15]
• Who will use the answer? A gap tied to a problem that managers or society face offers practical as well as scientific utility.^[2][13]

The evidence behind this

• Empirical generalizations in marketing: what the research shows
• Marketing knowledge: how it is made and when to trust it
• Citation analysis: what citation counts do and don't tell you

References

1. Cheng Lu Wang (2022). Editorial – The misassumptions about contributions. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 16(1), 1–2.
2. Kevin G. Corley, Dennis A. Gioia (2011). Building Theory about Theory Building: What Constitutes a Theoretical Contribution?. Academy of Management Review, 36(1), 12–32.
3. Robert W. Palmatier, Mark B. Houston, John Hulland (2018). Review articles: purpose, process, and structure. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 46(1), 1–5.
4. P.K. Kannan, H. Alice Li (2016). Digital marketing: A framework, review and research agenda. International Journal of Research in Marketing.
5. Christian Kowalkowski, Joona Keränen, Edwin J. Nijssen (2026). How B2B branding research measures up: A systematic review of key themes, theories, and methods. Industrial Marketing Management.
6. Sadasivan Pillai Sandesh, S. Sreejesh, Justin Paul (2022). Key account management in B2B marketing: A systematic literature review and research agenda. Journal of Business Research.
7. Yoram Wind, Byron Sharp (2009). Advertising Empirical Generalizations: Implications for Research and Action. Journal of Advertising Research.
8. Amy L. Wilson, Byron Sharp, Cathy Nguyen, Svetlana Bogomolova (2017). Expanding Marketing Empirical Generalisations to Health Behaviours: Physical Activity Is Not So Different From Buying Behaviour, After-All. Australasian Marketing Journal.
9. David A. Whetten (1989). What Constitutes a Theoretical Contribution?. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 490–495.
10. Ayhan Akpınar (2024). Sketching a comprehensive picture of the marketing discipline: a bibliometric analysis covering eight top-tier journals. Spanish Journal of Marketing - ESIC.
11. Werner Marx, Lutz Bornmann, Andreas Barth, Loet Leydesdorff (2013). Detecting the historical roots of research fields by reference publication year spectroscopy (<scp>RPYS</scp>). Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
12. Gary L. Lilien (2016). The B2B Knowledge Gap. International Journal of Research in Marketing.
13. David J. Reibstein, George Day, Jerry Wind (2009). Guest Editorial: Is Marketing Academia Losing Its Way?. Journal of Marketing.
14. Peter N. Golder, Marnik G. Dekimpe, Jake T. An, Harald J. van Heerde, Darren S. U. Kim, Joseph W. Alba (2022). Learning from Data: An Empirics-First Approach to Relevant Knowledge Generation. Journal of Marketing.
15. V. Kumar (2016). My Reflections on Publishing in Journal of Marketing. Journal of Marketing.
16. Robert I. Sutton, Barry M. Staw (1995). What Theory is Not. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40(3), 371–384.
17. Deborah J. MacInnis (2011). A Framework for Conceptual Contributions in Marketing. Journal of Marketing, 75(4), 136–154.

Bibliographic details only. Follow the DOI to read each study at its publisher.