Over the past twenty years, multiple fields—including medicine, social work, education, and public health—have come to recognize a disjuncture between research and practice. To take just one example, in the field of medicine, this disconnect has been famously described as the “17-year gap,” based on Weingarten and colleagues' [1] finding that “it takes 17 years to turn 14 percent of original research to the benefit of patient care.” Thus, the gap reflects both “attrition” of research findings (failure to translate into practice) and the length of time it takes for findings that do take root in practice to do so.
