Two psychiatrists, three boat builders and a million gap hunters: the choices we make in literature reviews

Throughout our education and beyond, we keep on hearing how literature reviews are an essential and, as such inevitable part of academia. So far, we agree. Literature reviews fulfil many pragmatic roles in science, research and teaching. In addition, many academics go as far as to say that searching literature has the purpose of finding a gap in knowledge. This is where we take a different view on the role of literature reviews, the nature of knowledge and their presentation in the 21st Century. This article aims to rethink what we researchers understand by the ubiquitous term ‘gap’ when reviewing the literature. It introduces the unchartered works of two psychiatrists (Pyotr Borisovich Gannushkin 1875-1933 and Grunya Efimovna Suhareva 1891-1981) who primarily published in Russian and therefore remained hidden from the English-speaking literature and as such demonstrate how the notion of ‘the gap’ is not all it appears to be. Principally, if the ‘gap’ is a question of presence and absence of evidence, as is the view of the gap-hunter then, we offer the metaphor of the boat builder and the activity of noticing literature. We will summarise in 10 points how our boat building as a genealogical model shares many similarities to translating texts from Russian, we learnt from Gannushkin’s and Suhareva’s work in autism.