COMPARING RESEARCH GAP STRATEGIES ON SOCIAL SCIENCE AND NATURAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ARTICLES

Ade Hidayat, Safnil Safnil, Arono Arono

Abstract


Previous studies on rhetorical style of presenting research gap (henceforth RG) focus only on specific field of studies, whereas there is no study that compare the research gap strategy used by different author from different field of studies. Thus, to fill the gap, it is important to expand the knowledge about how authors present research gap in different research field. As the research gaps are found in introduction section, 90 research article introductions have been analyzed. The corpus was taken from 6 different journals, 3 journal represent social science field (henceforth SS) and the other 3 represent natural science field (henceforth NS). Analysis was done to find out what strategy that are used by the authors based on the seven research gap strategies: evidence gap, knowledge gap, practical-knowledge gap, methodological gap, empirical gap, theoretical gap, and population gap. The result shows that knowledge gap in the mostly used strategy in presenting RG. Though, in natural science articles, knowledge gap is categorized as elective strategy, whereas in sosial science articles it can be categorized as regular strategy. Other findings are: practical-knowledge gap are only found in natural science articles; population gap are only found in sosial science articles; evidence gap, empirical gap, and methodological gap is found in both, while theoretical gap is not found in both. Though, the occurences are not very significant those strategies can only be categorized as elective. The significant result is the occurrence of knowledge gap in both research field. The other strategies show insignificant number of occurrences which might be caused by some limitation of this research such as number of articles analyzed and research area coverage. Therefore, further investigation might be important to support or criticize this study.


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References


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