Research organizations face challenges in creating infrastructures that cultivates and sustains interdisciplinary team science. The objective of this paper is to identify structural elements of organizations and training that promote team science.

We qualitatively analyzed the National Institutes of Health’s Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health, K12 using organizational psychology and team science theories to identify organizational design factors for successful team science and training.

Seven key design elements support team science: (1) semiformal meta-organizational structure, (2) shared context and goals, (3) formal evaluation processes, (4) meetings to promote communication, (5) role clarity in mentoring, (6) building interpersonal competencies among faculty and trainees, and (7) designing promotion and tenure and other organizational processes to support interdisciplinary team science.

This application of theory to a long-standing and successful program provides important foundational elements for programs and institutions to consider in promoting team science.

Systematic review and analysis of definitions of translational research.

The final corpus was comprised of 33 papers, each read by at least 2 reviewers. Definitions were mapped to a common set of research processes for presentation and analysis. Influence of papers and definitions was further evaluated using citation analysis and agglomerative clustering.

All definitions were mapped to common research processes, revealing most common labels for each process. Agglomerative clustering revealed 3 broad families of definitions. Citation analysis showed that the originating paper of each family has been cited ~10 times more than any other member.

Although there is little agreement between definitions, we were able to identify an emerging consensus 5-phase (T0–T4) definition for translational research. T1 involves processes that bring ideas from basic research through early testing in humans. T2 involves the establishment of effectiveness in humans and clinical guidelines. T3 primarily focuses on implementation and dissemination research while T4 focuses on outcomes and effectiveness in populations. T0 involves research such as genome-wide association studies which wrap back around to basic research.

We used systematic review and analysis to identify emerging consensus between definitions of translational research phases.