What is the Status of "Knowledge Translation" in Iranian Medical Sciences Researches?

Copyright: ©2019 The Author(s); Published by Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Sciences. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited What is the Status of "Knowledge Translation" in Iranian Medical Sciences Researches?

he history of thinking about the relationship between theory and practice and filling the gap between research and policy goes back to the middle of the 20 th century, and this process has been named differently, among them "knowledge translation" and "knowledge transfer" are the most important ones (1). Knowledge translation is a process in which the knowledge produced by research is transferred to the field of practice (2).
The share of the Islamic Republic of Iran in global knowledge production was 1.2 in 2013 which is good considering Iran's population. However, unfortunately, in other science-related indices such as "knowledge economy," "technology access," "innovation capacity" and "competitive industrial practice," Iran has a significantly lower rank in comparison to other countries (3). This issue is so important that Iran's Supreme Leader, in relation to research status, said: "scientific articles have had good progress both in quantity and quality, but there is an important issue that I have already mentioned several times, and fortunately, I have observed that this is repeated in the words of some friends that article production is not our objective. The quality of articles and the goal for writing articles are more important. The increase in the number of articles should show itself in our work and production market as well as our real life. The article should be written based on the country's needs. This is very important. Therefore, the issue is the quality of the articles and also it should be produced for a purpose. The growth in the number of articles is not the objective; it should show itself in the market" (4). The results of researches in different cultural, social, economic, political and health fields can be very effective in the development of society and solving its upcoming problems. In health sector, due to its nature, this issue has a special importance. Health and treatment sector, in addition to providing health care services, has the responsibility of doing researches for solving the problems and increasing the efficiency of this sector.
In relation to whatever has been mentioned so far, there are some questions: 1. Considering the importance of research and serious mission of health and treatment sector, to what extent are the researches based on needs?
2. Are the results of researches practical?

To what extent have the health problems been solved?
The simplest definition of research is solving a problem with a scientific procedure. Unfortunately, it seems that from the perspective of our researchers, the quantity of articles has replaced the quality of articles and need for solving problems. Reports show the increase in the number of articles in global science databases such as ISI, PubMed and Scopus. A great amount of money is spent yearly on doing researches and publishing articles in English. But, there has been no attempt so far for studying the quality of articles.
On the other hand, some of regulations of academic scoring and promotion of researchers, research centers and universities have worsened this issue; unfortunately, today, one of the criteria of academic promotion, funds and grants is the number of articles.
The other significant point is that to what extent the results of studies are used and to what extent health-related sciences are related to each other. During the recent years, establishing incubator centers in health field and their effects on global health has got specific attention (5) and this has been welcomed in Iran, too but practically, fewer researches are led practice.
Although, knowledge translation and the use of potentials of health technology incubators in medical sciences universities have provided solutions for changing ideas to practice and to some extent, this has got some attention in the country and in health sector, but still the role of these centers is not much significant. It is recommended to establish a committee in vice chancellors of medical sciences universities to select those research projects that are more practical and to support them more.
It would be more efficient if policy makers encourage the researchers to focus on the country's needs in their studies and to extend the results of their studies toward practical fields.