It is difficult to make any assessment of whether or not
there are research gaps based solely on article volume. To
provide some cross-validation, industry professionals were
asked to provide their feedback of areas in financial planning
that currently require the most attention and those that have
been overly researched (in their opinion). This survey was
directed electronically to the same 572 universities mentioned
above, distributed in paper form at the FPSC Professional
Development Day in Canada as well as limited distribution at
the Financial Planning Association Conference in Denver. Both
events where held in October 2010. Individual emails were also
directed to several hundred planning professionals and
executives and a mailing was carried out by the FPSC to all
registered CFP® certificate holders in Canada. Based on the
feedback from 743 industry professionals an importance
ranking was established for each research category. The
importance ranking, in conjunction with article volume, was
then used to determine specifically what areas of research are
in need of focus or potentially receive too much focus. The
ranking methodology can be found in Appendix H.1.
Literature Scan
Total Published Articles by Topic/Category
In total, 1,978 literary articles were sourced in the
literature survey (as presented in Table 1). The breakdown of
each category can be seen in the following table. The most
active categories were Retirement Planning (419 articles),
Portfolio Management (317 articles) and Behavioural Finance
(246 articles). The least active areas of research were
Regulatory & Compliance (48 articles), Tax Planning (58