Using Metaphors to Make Research Findings Meaningful

Researchers, educators, and funding agencies frequently lament that research is seldom read or put into practice by clinicians. Clinicians, on the other hand, note that they are busy and do not have the time or even the knowledge to read research articles that may be dense and filled with jargon. Traditional ways of disseminating knowledge are often insufficient; therefore, many funding agencies encourage researchers to find innovative ways to help their funded research be applied in practice. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR; CIHR, 2012), for example, emphasized that varied strategies for knowledge translation, including non-academic modes of communication, are often needed to reach potential knowledge-user audiences beyond the research community. The CIHR encourage researchers to adapt their language of publication to fit target audiences and to present findings in alternative formats. In this column, we propose the use of metaphor as one innovative way to make knowledge useful for application in healthcare settings, so that, as noted by Straus et al. (2011), findings can be easily understood and capture the attention of the intended users of the knowledge.