A Critical Study on How Non-Native English Writers Indicate the Research Gap in Research Article Introductions

Writing research article to a peer reviewed publication is a complex process and involves
daunting communication with the referees, co-authors and editors. Publication writing is more
challenging than the usual communicative expression yet; prolific writers often pass through the
processes without too much difficulty. Prolific writers draw on many writing strategies and one of the
strategies is by highlighting the research gap. Most of the time, the research gaps highlighted are
those related to the intended research niche and the intended study. While the strategy has been
used and taught in many research writing instances, the strategy has been reported to be unpopular
amongst the non-native English research writers. Although many non-native English writers are aware
of the importance of the research gap, not much is known on how this strategy is being practiced. In
view of the underutilization of this strategy and limited studies on the strategy in non-native context,
this paper investigates the use of this strategy in 150 research articles introductions in Computer
Science disciplines written by academicians in Malaysian Universities. The finding of this study
confirmed that indicating research gap as a strategy is underutilized by the research articles written in
the corpus. In addition, this paper also described four various ways on how this strategy is commonly
used by the non-native writers. The confirmation and authentic examples may be useful in the
teaching and learning of research article writing.