"The time interval between the first report on preparation, isolation, or synthesis (or the earliest patent) and the highly cited articles reporting successful clinical interventions -- between the report of findings with clinical potential and the determination via clinical trials that that promise is realized in a treatment -- is the "translational lag". (There is, of course, another lag that's harder to quantify this way -- that between the initial findings in the research lab and the publication of those findings.) Contopoulos-Ioannidis et al. found that the median translational lag for the highly cited articled in their study was 24 years." - Shannon Jiménez