In certain fields (like Humanities) you can´t possibly catch all the variables. The best thing to do is admit it from the first in your articles. The admission helps future researchers to look for new variables.
Go and have a beer !!!! sounds like you've done enough reading. That is life, there is always missing information. Even the most astute of professors, sometimes miss the obvious - it happens.
In certain fields (like Humanities) you can´t possibly catch all the variables. The best thing to do is admit it from the first in your articles. The admission helps future researchers to look for new variables.
Well, i will not miss the beer and in between i will add "modeling", math and computer simulations tto test the "model" and see what's going on with the current variables... if the model does not fit the facts, then you revise your model... Salud Yoli, cheers!
We are all trying to find those variables that no-one has thought about or for which there is no unanimity. Information is missing in the articles because not every researcher knew about all the recent papers you have at your disposal. For example, today Google Scholar lists 3,100,00 papers mentioning CO2, and 4,230 papers on “CO2 desorption”!
Not only do you not know all variables, but you do not know how to measure all of them, because the tools are still under development.
We have just submitted an 8-page paper, based on my annotated library of 300 documents for the general project, of which only 6 needed to be referenced. Because it is a short paper, we did not define all possible variables, only the bare minimum required for the paper.