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The Effortless Academic

Automating the search for research gaps

Published 4 months ago • 1 min read

Workflow: Automatically find research gaps through references in large review papers

Dear Scholar,

My upcoming webinar on spotting research gaps is just a week away, and over a 100 participants have already joined. If you missed it, don't hesitate to get your ticket. In this week's newsletter, I am presenting a key method that will be part of the upcoming webinar: Spotting research gaps automatically using references of review papers.

In other news, if you have been following me on Twitter/X consider joining me on LinkedIn as I am slowly migrating from Twitter.

​Find research gaps automatically through reference gaps (15 min read)

This article proposes that research gaps can be found in references that authors of prominent review papers forgot to mention. To find these reference gaps automatically we upload large reference lists to Litmaps and let this tool search for missing references. The results are then collected and by looking at all the "gap papers," a theme of a research gap emerges.

Webinar: Finding Research Gaps

Research gaps and literature reviews are two sides of the same coin. Research gaps become easy to see if you can do a thorough review. But organising your findings for this is a big challenge. As with every webinar, I asked the participants what they struggled with and hoped to get out of it. The answer was predominantly Efficiency and Organization.

This webinar focuses on two key components: Note-taking and visual synthesis of your findings. These are the ingredients that need to be taught at grad school. They are crucial to finding research gaps and conducting impactful research. You will learn to:

  • Organize your findings in a simple way
  • Take notes that serve you for years
  • Learn how to synthesise an entire literature review with dozens of papers
  • Use AI to come up with research questions
  • Use the best available tools to find literature

I am confident that this webinar will be a game-changer for all participants who are currently grappling with their research projects or Ph.D.s. It will equip you with a clear strategy to streamline and simplify your research, tailored to your specific needs and challenges.

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What do other people say?

More than half of the participants in the current webinar have visited a webinar with me previously (thank you for this vote of confidence). If you are considering joining but not sure what to expect, you might be in the same spot as Dr. Woodlock, who joined the last webinar on literature reviews:

I hope to provide a similar experience to somebody who joins this webinar as well.

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Write to me with any questions or suggestions by replying to this email.

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Ilya Shabanov,

The Effortless Academic​

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Literature Review Tools, Note-Taking Strategies and AI tutorials for the modern academic. Publish more with less effort and supercharge your career.

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