Guides · Submitting and peer review

Research gap vs contribution: why a gap is not enough

A research gap is something the literature has not yet examined; a contribution is a change in what the field understands or can do. Editors of marketing and management journals warn that being the first to study a topic or setting is not a contribution in itself. The gap motivates the study; the contribution is what the study reveals about why, when or for whom a relationship holds.

Two different claims

A gap is a claim about the literature: nobody has studied this topic, this country or this industry. A contribution is a claim about knowledge: after reading the paper, people understand something differently. Wang, writing as editor of a marketing journal, separates the two sharply. A topic that has never been examined is not for that reason a research gap, and a first study in a particular context is not automatically a contribution; it may be trivial unless the authors show why it matters and should not be ignored.^[1]

Whetten's criteria for theory papers make the same point from the other direction. The aim is to challenge and extend what is known, not to restate it, and a modification of existing theory should change scholars' current views in important ways. In judging a contribution, he gives more weight to how far an idea departs from current thinking than to how much of the field it covers.^[2]

Why gap-only framing gets rejected

Framing a paper around a gap tends to produce two kinds of paper that editors describe as lacking contribution. The first is the niche study. At the Journal of Marketing, the foremost reason for desk rejection in the mid-2010s was lack of generalizability: a study of one company's market potential for one segment in one country tells readers little beyond that case. The editor's remedy was not a different setting but a general theory, with the specific market serving as a demonstration that other studies could extend.^[3]

The second is the known effect in a new context. The editor of the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science notes that articles retesting known effects or theories while only varying the national setting or product often fail to reach publication. Wang describes the same pattern when a well-established theory is applied to a new technology without showing why the theory sheds light on it; such studies add one more repetition to hundreds of existing ones.^[4][1]

When a new context does count

A new setting can carry a contribution, but only if it teaches something about the theory. Whetten argues that applying an existing model to a new setting and finding that it works as expected is not instructive by itself. It has theoretical merit when something about the setting gives reason to expect the theory not to work there. He prefers qualitatively different conditions over simple extensions of range, and asks that a new application improve the theory rather than merely reaffirm it.^[2]

The reverse also holds. Showing that an established model performs poorly in a new setting is not enough on its own. The contribution comes from explaining why the anomaly exists and revising the model's factors and relationships to accommodate it.^[2]

Things that look like contributions but are not

Several parts of a paper are easily mistaken for a contribution, or used to cover the lack of one:^[5][1]

• A long reference list. Naming theories and citing the papers that contain them is not the same as setting out their causal logic and how it leads to your prediction.^[5]
• Data and prior findings. Empirical patterns describe what was observed; theory explains why. Motivating hypotheses only with earlier results is what Sutton and Staw call brute empiricism.^[5]
• A new variable added to a list. Adding factors to an existing model seldom satisfies reviewers unless it changes the accepted relationships and reorganises how we understand the causes at work.^[2]
• A grand model with many paths. Wang reports many submissions whose hypotheses exist mainly to connect boxes in a large model and restate what the literature already knows.^[1]
• More hypotheses. Splitting a construct into dimensions to multiply hypotheses, or writing hypotheses after seeing which variables are significant, adds length rather than contribution. Strong theory usually grows from one or a few ideas.^[1][5]
• A diagram. Boxes and arrows can put an argument in order, but they rarely explain why the connections should be observed.^[5][2]

What a contribution looks like

Whetten describes a theory in terms of what (the factors), how (their relationships), why (the underlying logic) and who, where and when (the boundary conditions). He calls the why the most fruitful and the most difficult route to a contribution. It often involves borrowing a perspective from another field that challenges the rationale behind accepted theories.^[2]

Corley and Gioia's review of editorial statements finds two dimensions behind judgements of contribution: originality, which can be incremental or revelatory, and utility, which can be scientific or practical. Papers strong on both originality and scientific usefulness stand out, while papers weak on both are likely to be desk rejected or rejected after the first round. They also note that editors at leading management journals have come to prefer revelatory, surprising insight over incremental advances.^[6]

MacInnis offers a map written for marketing. A conceptual contribution can envision something new, explicate an idea by delineating or summarising it, relate ideas by differentiating or integrating them, or debate an idea by advocating or refuting it. She ties interesting ideas to challenging assumptions that readers hold, not simply to being new.^[7]

Wang names the kinds of overlooked insight that editors value: an important intervening variable, a boundary condition, or a resolution of contrasting findings. A later editorial adds that a prediction becomes interesting when it explains how, and under which conditions, an expected relationship turns out differently, which usually means identifying a mechanism or a boundary condition.^[1][8]

Where the gap belongs in your paper

None of this makes gaps useless. In Wang's account of a paper as a story, the gap supplies the conflict: it creates tension by pointing to what the literature overlooked or to puzzles with conflicting evidence, and the contribution is how the study resolves them. The introduction should establish why the topic matters and then name the gaps and the potential contribution.^[8]

A practical test follows from the questions editors say they ask. Whetten's reviewers ask what is new, so what, and why so; the Journal of Marketing's acceptance criteria ask whether a paper is interesting, valid, broadly appealing and practical. If your contribution statement answers these without relying on the claim that nobody has studied the topic before, the gap is doing its proper job as motivation.^[2][3]

Limits of this advice

These sources are editorials and essays by editors and senior scholars, and several were written for management rather than marketing journals. They describe the standards their authors apply, not tests of which framings get accepted, and the two editorials by Wang reflect one editor's reading of submissions to one journal.^{[1][8][2][5][6][7][3][4]}

The evidence behind this

• Marketing knowledge: how it is made and when to trust it
• Empirical generalizations in marketing: what the research shows

References

1. Cheng Lu Wang (2022). Editorial – The misassumptions about contributions. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 16(1), 1–2.
2. David A. Whetten (1989). What Constitutes a Theoretical Contribution?. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 490–495.
3. V. Kumar (2016). My Reflections on Publishing in Journal of Marketing. Journal of Marketing.
4. Robert W. Palmatier (2016). Editorial: the past, present, and future of JAMS. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.
5. Robert I. Sutton, Barry M. Staw (1995). What Theory is Not. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40(3), 371–384.
6. 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.
7. Deborah J. MacInnis (2011). A Framework for Conceptual Contributions in Marketing. Journal of Marketing, 75(4), 136–154.
8. Cheng Lu Wang (2025). Editorial: Demonstrating contributions through storytelling. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing.

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