Making It Through the Second Gate: How Gatekeepers Select Academic Papers to Translate for Practice

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With a growing number of platforms translating management research for practitioner guidance, research impact on practice has become an increasingly prominent and popular topic. However, almost no attention has been paid to the very important roles of gatekeepers in this process, those who choose research to be translated. In this paper, we investigate how knowledge translators select peer-reviewed scholarly research papers for translation for practitioners. Based on Gatekeeping theory, we collected and analyzed multiple types of data from a magazine that publishes translations of scholarly research for practitioners in order to delineate the criteria the magazine’s knowledge translators used in selecting research papers to translate. We studied the magazine’s website, interviewed its knowledge translators, and used a matched sample of unselected research papers to empirically assess empirically the actual criteria used. We found that knowledge translators are more likely to choose papers that have explicit sets of implications for practice, are more recently published, are written by high status authors in high status journals, and are seen by knowledge translators as “interesting”, “counterintuitive”, as well as “trustworthy”. We discuss the implications for these findings for the gatekeeping literature, for research on knowledge translation processes, and for academics’ research and publication.