Dr J

The worst and most useless advice given to PhD students: find a gap in literature. Here's why: The problem with "finding a gap in literature" is that it's an analogy. It assumes that an academic field is like a wall. Every researcher brings a brick or two and that's how we this wall gets built. Sometimes researchers are unable to solve a problem, which results in a "gap" in the wall. The analogy of finding a gap in literature, like any other analogy, distorts the actual process of how academic research gets done. As a result, graduate students try to find a topic that no one has written about before. This is counterproductive at best and utter madness at worst. Let's say I start researching a topic like "The Effect of Reading Hans Christian Andersen's Stories on the Production of Milk Among Danish Cows." No one has written about this topic and I can argue that there is a gap in literature. The problem is even if I were to write a whole 400-page monograph on this topic, it will not move the field forward. No one in the field of Andersen studies is interested this topic. If you follow the advice of finding a gap in literature, you may end up doing research that no one is interested in. So what should you do? Here's a suggestion: try to find a problem you feel passionately about. This may be a bit tricky if you are starting out. So, read about it, think about it, and write what make of it. Most importantly, know that there is a place in the world for whatever you have to say on a given topic. Example: I had a problem that I had spent years thinking about before my PhD. And the problem was how a South Asian Muslim identity got constructed in and through Urdu literature. I read about Urdu literature and identity formation in colonial India and figured two writers whose works I wanted to enagage with. Nazir Ahmad, a 19th century Urdu novelist, and Benedict Anderson, the famous Anglo-Irish political scientist. There is a lot of scholarship on Nazir Ahmad's novels and Benedict Anderson's book "Imagined Communities" is a considered a classic in the humanities and social sciences. A lot of folks had written about Nazir Ahmad and Anderson's work. So, not many gaps in the literature. But no one had looked at how Nazir Ahmad's novels created an "imagined community" of Muslims in colonial India. So, I did this in my dissertation. I didn't try to find a gap in literature. I solved a problem that I felt passionately about.

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