"Interventions for Promoting Research Knowledge Translation: Modifying faculty members' promotion criteria"

"nIn today's world the importance of research has reached a stage where, in academic settings the rate of presenting research articles is considered as a merit in scientific evaluations. The numbers of research articles published in internationally acclaimed databanks are also taken into account and scored in academic promotion criteria. This is indicative of the progress research has made in the country. The important point is that once a project is over the only way the results reach target audiences is through publication of articles, and proper measures are not taken to transfer the research results to their respective target audiences and apply them (knowledge translation). Therefore the studies conducted are not applied in meeting the country's research needs, community's health and decision makings at macro level. It is now time to encourage researchers toward utilization of research by considering research-based knowledge translation activities in the faculty members' promotion criteria. In this study we examined the promotion criteria of renowned universities in the world for the presence of knowledge translation activities and compared them with our own criteria. The result is the suggestion of allocating scores to studies conducted at various levels (organizational units of the university or its equivalent, the university or national level) that result in change in service delivery, management techniques, and/or lifestyles.