Introductions and research gaps

Your introduction needs to outline the general area of research along with your specific focus of interest. In it, state your explicit research ‘gap’ and narrow down to your research question or hypothesis. This often leads naturally to a thesis statement - an explicit statement outlining your proposed argument. This can sometimes be absent from the introduction, and instead you might reveal the argument throughout the thesis; however, this is not optimal. 

Image: Location of the Introduction in an experimental-type thesis.  

While it is the job of the Introduction to expose the research gap, it is in the literature review that you explore the gap in more detail.

There are many ways to write an introduction, and discipline-specific conventions in terms of what can be included in it. In higher degree study, it is best to think of an Introduction as involving a series of stages:

• contextualisation of a problem area, or area of debate
• outline of existing solutions to the problem or approaches to the debate
• articulation of the best solution or most promising theoretical approach
• outline of the limitations of the current approach and articulation of the research ‘gap’ (i.e., what is missing or overlooked in current approaches or what could be done better)
• outline of a potentially novel approach, framed by a research question or hypothesis
• statement of the overall aim and purpose, and an outline of the proposed study.

Each of the six stages are represented in the following diagram.  

Image: The structure of an Introduction (from Bahadoran, Jeddi, Mirmiran, & Ghasemi, 2018).