This report updates a 1983 analysis of fifty-eight knowledge gap studies, adding thirty-nine studies and pointing out innovative ways to improve research in the area. The persistence of knowledge inequalities across topics and research settings has serious consequences. Gaps in public affairs and health knowledge have an especially severe impact on those groups most negatively affected by socioeconomic changes, who also tend to be information poor. Rapid growth of socioeconomic divisions between “haves” and “have-nots” in the last two decades suggests that knowledge gaps deserve increased research attention because they are related and potentially affected phenomena.
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