Rethinking stroke recovery research: a review of knowledge use and the need for team science

Stroke recovery research on living humans has made recent strides toward a consensus in support of new knowledge-to-action interventions. This venue could become fertile ground for future milestones, driven by the conceptualization and dissemination of standards that can aid the aggregation of large datasets for further interpretation in the stroke recovery science. For example, a meta-analysis could identify biomarkers that predict recovery, or outcome measures that detect neurological recovery. Nevertheless, the current breadth of research requires a systematic framework to enable the transfer of this powerful knowledge to the end users (e.g., clinicians and decision-makers). Team Science (TS) and the Science of Team Science (SciTS) are two emerging concepts that could foster an approach of inter professional collaboration on specific research inquiries between scientists in different fields. Presently, however, the stroke recovery literature favours parallel but separate research interventions in the areas of sensor motor, cognitive and speech-language problems. TS and the SciTS together hold the potential to navigate the interference between these three problem categories, avoid unnecessary overlapping efforts and facilitate the broad translation of the findings.