Turning literature search failure into literature search success: a note

Turning literature search failure into literature success: a note:

Academic search failure (?): no relevant academic references and slightly relevant but stale references

When doing literature search, it often happens that easy literature search task does not succeed as expected. For instance, my dissertation supervisee wanted to find some academic articles on "sales competence", she soon realized that she could not find one academic article explicitly on sales competence, say, via Google Scholar search. Likewise, ebook search on sales competence did not identify books specifically cover sales competence. On top of that, those academic references that mildly touch on the sales competence topic were quite outdated (i.e. published more than 5 years ago). Naturally, the student felt quite disappointed because her research methods teacher (i.e. me) repeatedly stresses the importance of using updated academic references for literature review purpose. The literature search result is disappointing as the topic of "sales competence" does not look like an odd topic.

For that, I offer the following advice (3 points):

Point 1. If it is difficult to find relevant academic literature on the topic, e.g. sales competence", this can be argued to be a major research gap. Thus, a research objective "to evaluate the sales competence of ABC Ltd" has good academic value as the research project could contributes to filling this major research gap. As such the student's literature search is not a search failure but a literature search success.

Point 2. Well, how can it be a literature search success when no directly relevant academic references found, say, on the topic of "sales competence"? Now, consider this, do Google search on "sales competence". Happily you now found some very updated articles from practitioners on "sales competence". It is now time to carry on the next step on literature search and review.

Point 3. Select three frameworks or checklists, etc., on sales competence from Point 2 and pick up 3-4 academic ideas that can be associated, probably less directly, to the sales competence topic. Synthesize all the ideas and frameworks (as ideas)from Points 2-3 into an overall theoretical framework (which makes all these ideas and frameworks into a holistic framework).Such a theoretical framework is constructed in a way that should be responsive, e.g., to the research objective that is "to evaluate the sales competence of ABC Ltd". 

Now you have done a useful literature review with updated references (including academic references) that is responsive to your research objective under consideration. [A literature search and review success].

This discussion (the three points of advice) serves as a practice note for my MBA students to conduct literature review for their dissertation projects.