Recently, knowledge translation (KT) has gained increasing attention among academicians, especially health scholars. An easy to grasp but comprehensive definition of KT would be: timely delivering accurate knowledge in an effective form to targeted people, and collecting, organizing and delivering feedback data to scholars in due time. Originally, KT was developed to bridge the gap between knowledge production and knowledge application or utilization in the clinical setting. However, approaching this primary goal has not been always easy. From the inception to date, various models with somehow different approaches have been introduced to deal with the issue, but there still remains a lot of work to be done in KT field; one of them, for example, introducing a capable KT tool to measure KT projects’ achievements and performance. Through a critical narrative review study, we discussed KT concept, models, and tools, as well as promising KT experiences, and addressed some possibly neglected aspects of KT in the conclusion section. Despite definitive and decisive goal, most of what we reviewed in the literature was focusing on KT frameworks and less attention was paid to first-hand experiences of KT. Regardless of the issues the KT bears, there are ongoing efforts to develop helpful KT models and strategies, to translate research findings into practice. There is almost no doubt that successful implementation of KT will finally help to improve life quality.

Keywords