Q: What does it mean if there is limited or no existing research on my topic?

You have two-three questions. Let’s take them one by one.

Why is there limited or non-existent research on your topic?

This may be interpreted in several ways. In one way, it might be good there is less/no existent literature because this means your topic is novel. However, other ways of looking at this are that the topic is emerging or niche, the topic or question is too narrow, or the topic / question has not been expressed well. From the statement of your topic alone, the latter two don’t seem to be the issue. A final consideration, of course, is that your search may need to be done better. For tips on making your literature search more effective, it may be useful to go through this article: Tips for effective literature searching and keeping up with new publications

How can you identify the issues and write the problem statement?

By ‘issues,’ perhaps you mean ‘gaps’ and / or the problems. For both these, again, it helps to do a comprehensive literature search. However, for help with identifying gaps, you may find this article useful: Don't know where to start? 6 Tips on identifying research gaps

Finally, for help with writing the problem statement, you may refer to the following resources:

• How to write a problem statement for my research?
• How to write a statement of the problem

Note: The second is a link to a course on R Upskill, a related brand providing learning programs (courses, masterclasses, handbooks, and so on) for researchers. Presently, there’s a Happiness Offer on the entire range of programs from R Upskill, so do check it out!

Hope all that helps. All the best for progressing on your manuscript!

For further insights, you may wish to go through these similar queries by previous researchers:

• How can I describe the gap in literature when no previous research has been done on the problem?
• How to build the rationale of the study if there is no research gap?