This paper examines how higher education researchers approach writing the rationale and justification for their work published in journal articles. A common way for establishing this justification is through claiming a gap, but the problem is that it is often hard to find a research gap, and if it is included, there is too often no explanation for why the gap is worthwhile in terms of its contribution to knowledge. What we do not know is how this task is approached across the field, what different approaches are taken, and what the implications might be for the quality of research and the advancement of knowledge. Therefore, we examined the gap statements from 124 articles from five top-ranked higher education journals. What we found is that the majority of articles do have a gap statement, but these are mostly implicit rather than explicit, and located somewhere in the introductory text. However, 20% of articles had no gap statement and 27% of all articles had no justification for the importance of the research. Based on the data and drawing on theory, we present a tool to assist with writing gap statements and comment on current practice in relation to knowledge contribution.