understudied

15:39 May 20, 2015 

Thanks for all the reassurance that I was right!

After changing this so many times, I was beginning to wonder if I had missed something. I do NOT want to be the arrogant Brit declaring something is ´not English´, but actually meaning ´I´ve never seen it before in my neck of the woods.´
When meanwhile the diligent foreigner has looked it up and knows what she is talking about. This one does with regard to terminology, but she sprinkles her texts with Norwegian punctuation and has not got the hang of people/persons/patients or apostrophes...
I have to do some work for my fee :-)

15:05 May 20, 2015 

"understudy" is not only reserved for the theatre, it is mostly a noun there and is used in the sense when someone learns/has learnt the role of another to be able to substitute him/her if necessary. It's an intransitive verb when not a noun. It's not spelt with a hyphen, and the sense is very far from what you need, i.e., not studied/researched it enough in detail - in the science world, and is also a transitive verb, that's why it can be in the passive as "the field is under-researched". So I agree with the others that you shouldn't use 'understudy', not even with a hyphen.

12:19 May 20, 2015 

My vote goes to gallagy's "under-researched". I would avoid "inadequately" because it could be taken to mean "badly" rather than (or as well as) "too little", and I doubt that's what the author means to say (though you never know).

I don't think "under-studied" works even with a hyphen, but that's just my opinion.

I also wonder about "little studied", though I don't think it's worth another answer, and anyway "little" is not exactly the same as "less than it should have been".

11:21 May 20, 2015 

I like the hyphen solution :-)
It might also save a moment of irritation with the client, who usually follows my suggestions, at least when she remembers!
It could be a useful face-saving compromise.

But otherwise I tend to find that all references to understudies are in the theatrical sense, or metaphors related to it.

11:00 May 20, 2015 

...if you hyphenated it? Under-studied.