For clinicians and researchers collaborating to advance the sciences, a forum in the latest issue of Perspectives provides the latest resources you need! Guest editor Trina Spencer writes that the forum, “Creating and Documenting Clinical Impact of Clinical Practice Research,” provides researchers with tools to make their work more useful to clinicians, helping bridge the gap between research and practice.

Spencer is the chair of ASHA’s Committee on Clinical Research, Implementation Science, and Evidence-Based Practice (CRISP). Although Perspectives content is mainly available to affiliates of ASHA’s Special Interest Groups, these articles are open access for all to read and use in their everyday practice.

Creating and Documenting Clinical Impact

The forum opens with an introduction by Spencer focusing on the work of ASHA’s CRISP Committee. Spencer explains the need for evidence-based practice in communication sciences and disorders (CSD) before providing an overview of the forum.

Next, Spencer joins Utianski and Wallace as they describe the barriers to clinical practice research and highlight resources for researchers. The authors point out that many of these resources are readily available through ASHA—and that researchers can even obtain funding for clinical practice research.

Sometimes, a third party can act as a “knowledge broker” between researchers and clinicians, promoting accessible research to clinicians. In their article, Douglas et al. describe the concept of knowledge brokering and promote “low-risk” action items that readers can implement immediately to serve as knowledge brokers.

Researchers can use social media to help their articles reach the right audience, but many may think that getting started is overwhelming or time consuming. A tutorial by Davidson, Mahendra, and Nicholson breaks down the process of using social media to disseminate your research into five easy steps.

In the final article of the forum, Nicholson and Smith introduce researchers to popular methods to track the impact of their work and provide tools to document that impact. The authors provide six steps that can help them track impact, including how to record their work in a curriculum vitae (CV) to help researchers advance in their careers.

We’d like to thank Trina Spencer and all of the authors for their work in putting together this forum. You can hear more about the forum from Spencer in a video below.

More Clinical Practice Resources

Spencer recommends that interested readers also watch “Creating and Documenting Clinical Impact,” a professional development unit on ASHA’s Clinical Research Education (CREd) library. The free unit, created by CRISP, contains a recorded presentation on many of the topics highlighted in the forum—as well as a panel discussion video. You can check out more CRISP resources on the CREd library.

This forum is the latest in a series of forums on implementation science in the ASHA Journals. If you haven’t already, be sure to read the previous forum, “Putting Research Into Practice: Tutorials on Clinical Research, Implementation Science, and Evidence-Based Practice.” More recently, the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology (AJSLP) published a forum titled “Clinicians and Researchers Navigating Implementation Science in CSD.”

Whether you serve as a clinician, work as a researcher, or look to be a knowledge broker, we hope that this forum provides you with resources and inspiration to help bridge the gap between research and practice. You can read the entire forum here or check out the individual articles below!

Explore the Forum

Davidson, M. M., Mahendra, N., & Nicholson, N. (2022). Creating clinical research impact through social media: Five easy steps to get started. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, 7(3), 669–⁠678. https://doi.org/10.1044/2022_PERSP-21-00208

Douglas, N., Oshita, J., Schliep, M., & Feuerstein, J. (2022). Knowledge brokering in communication sciences and disorders. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, 7(3), 663–⁠668. https://doi.org/10.1044/2022_PERSP-21-00204

Nicholson, N., & Smith, S. L. (2022). How to document scientific and clinical impact of research: Six steps to success. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, 7(3), 679–⁠695. https://doi.org/10.1044/2022_PERSP-21-00234

Spencer, T. D. (2022). Clinical impact of research: Introduction to the forum. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, 7(3), 647–⁠650. https://doi.org/10.1044/2022_PERSP-22-00012

Utianski, R. L., Spencer, T. D., & Wallace, S. E. (2022). Clinical impact requires clinical practice research. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, 7(3), 651–⁠662. https://doi.org/10.1044/2021_PERSP-21-00197