Summary:The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) introduces a new translational research framework that builds upon previous biomedical models to create a more comprehensive and integrated environmental health paradigm. The framework was developed as a graphical construct that illustrates the complexity of designing, implementing, and tracking translational research in environmental health. We conceptualize translational research as a series of concentric rings and nodes, defining “translation” as movement either from one ring to another or between nodes on a ring. A “Fundamental Questions” ring expands upon the research described in other frameworks as “basic” to include three interrelated concepts critical to basic science research: research questions, experimental settings, and organisms. This feature enables us to capture more granularity and thus facilitates an approach for categorizing translational research and its growth over time. We anticipate that the framework will help researchers develop compelling long-term translational research stories and accelerate public health impacts by clearly mapping out opportunities for collaborations. By using this paradigm, researchers everywhere will be better positioned to design research programs, identify research partners based on cross-disciplinary research needs, identify stakeholders who are likely to use the research for environmental decision-making and intervention, and track progress toward common goals. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP3657

In this introductory article we define environmental change strategies (ECS), summarize the primary challenges associated with evaluating ECS, and provide an overview of the methods researchers have employed to begin to address these challenges. This special issue provides a range of examples, from researchers and practitioners in the field, of different approaches for addressing these challenges. These articles present new methods to understand and test how ECS are implemented and propose methods to evaluate their implementation. The content of the articles covers multiple public health issues, including substance abuse prevention, tobacco control, HIV prevention, and obesity prevention. This special issue is intended to build the evidence base for effective ECS, generate compelling discussion, critical analyses, and spur future research that will help improve the implementation and evaluation of ECS.

As federal programs are held more accountable for their research investments, The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) has developed a new method to quantify the impact of our funded research on the scientific and broader communities. In this article we review traditional bibliometric analyses, address challenges associated with them, and describe a new bibliometric analysis method, the Automated Research Impact Assessment (ARIA). ARIA taps into a resource that has only rarely been used for bibliometric analyses: references cited in “important” research artifacts, such as policies, regulations, clinical guidelines, and expert panel reports. The approach includes new statistics that science managers can use to benchmark contributions to research by funding source. This new method provides the ability to conduct automated impact analyses of federal research that can be incorporated in program evaluations. We apply this method to several case studies to examine the impact of NIEHS funded research.