LITERATURE REVIEW

Researchers from Washington State University and Ohio State University have
developed a low-cost, easy way to make custom lenses that could help manufacturers avoid
the expensive molds required for optical manufacturing.

Led by Lei Li, assistant professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials
Engineering, and graduate student, Mojtaba Falahati, the researchers developed a liquid
mold from droplets that they can manipulate with magnets to create lenses in a variety of
shapes and sizes. Their work is featured on the cover of the journal, Applied Physics Letters.

High-quality lenses are increasingly used in everything from cameras, to self-driving

cars, and virtually all robotics, but the traditional molding and casting processes used in
their manufacturing require sophisticated and expensive metal molds. So, manufacturers
are mostly limited to mass producing one kind of lens.

"The molds are precisely finished and are difficult to make," said Li. "It isn't
worthwhile to make a mold for low-volume production."

The researchers ran into the problem firsthand as they searched for lenses for their
work to develop a portable laboratory reader on a phone.

They first tried to make their own lenses using 3D printing but found it difficult to
control the lens shape. They then came up with the idea of using magnets and the surface
tension of liquids to literally create free-flowing molds.

They placed tiny, magnetic iron particles into liquid droplets and built a device to
surround the droplets with magnets. They then poured the plastic material used in lenses
over the droplet. As they applied a magnetic field, the droplet took on a conical lens shape -
creating a mold for the plastic lens material. Once they cured the plastic, it hardened and
had the same optical properties and imaging quality as a commercially purchased lens. The
liquid droplet remains separate and can be re-used.

The magnets can be moved to change the magnetic field, the shape of the mold, and
the resulting lens. The researchers also used bigger or smaller droplets to create lenses of
varying sizes.

The authors recovered 361 contributions (articles, reviews, letters to the editor, etc.)
for 1962 to 2016. The distribution for five-year periods shows a significant increase in 2012
to 2016, with a growth of 222.22% in comparison with the previous period 2012 to 2016.
The countries with the highest production are the United states with 135 contributions,
United Kingdom with 46, and India with 19. The most productive institutions are Harvard
Medical school, Boston Foundation for Sight, and Moorfields Eye Hospital National Health
Service Foundation Trust. Classification of authors based on productivity is strongly
concentrated in small producers, with a transient index of 59.03. The total number of
authors is 891, representing a coauthor index of 2.47 for the 361 documents retrieved. The
authors with the highest productivity are Kenneth W. Pullum, Perry Rosenthal, and Deborah
S. Jacobs, with an h-index between 12 and 19 documents. The number of documents
published on scleral lenses shows a significant increase in the last 5 years, and currently,
they represent only 1.44% of all publications on contact lenses.

The latter method, however, fails to synthesize the literature. In addition some
authors have selected a lensdirected approach. Jasperson et al. (2002) is one of the first
papers where lenses are used. Actually they use two sets of lenses, but an individual lens is
a concept. When a concept divides a reality into two parts, those belong to the domain of a
certain concept and those that do not belong, a concept is not very powerful tool to
differentiate things. Rowe has long thought about stronger conceptual tools for literature
review. In his 2012 editorial he concludes that "in order to analyze the phenomenon and get
interesting results, researchers need to have a good conceptual framework, not necessarily
a theory, but a set of coherent macro-concepts. This conceptual framework will help them
to analyze theoretically the dimensions of each concept and thus code the data." (Rowe
2012, p. 471). Two years later he states that "a review that is using an original and relevant
analytical lens is very likely to lead to the identification of knowledge gaps and theoretical
bias." (Rowe 2014, p. 251) We in this paper explain how multidimensional constructs of a
conceptual framework can be unpacked into more fine-grained classifications to review a
domain of literature. We shall use a classification of a particular dimension as a lens and we
can then achieve a more differentiating power than a concept as a lens. Our purpose is to
show how lenses can be used to identify research gaps. It is fundamental to all research to
carefully formulate grounded research questions. Sandberg and Alvesson (2011) propose a
taxonomy of ways to constructing research questions. Their findings suggest that the most
common way of producing research questions is to spot various gaps in the existing
literature, such as an overlooked area and, based on that, to formulate specific research
questions. Gap-spotting is of course not something absolute but varies in both size and
complexity: from incrementally extending an established theory to identifying more
significant gaps in the existing literature. According to Sandberg and Alvesson (2011) gap-
spotting questions are unlikely to lead to significant theories because they do not question
the assumptions which underlie existing literature in any substantive ways. In other words,
gap-spotting is more likely to reinforce or moderately revise, rather than challenge, already
influential theories. Instead of their criticism gap-spotting questions is the mostly way to
develop research questions, and we cannot bypass it. Sandberg and Alvesson (2011) provide
four ways to spot gaps and to go beyond gap-spotting. They do not give much help how the
latter could take place. We shall is this paper develop rules and opportunities as
improvements of lenses and they seem to show some movements towards the direction
that Sandberg and Alvesson prefer.