Background: Translational research involves moving basic research to practice and ultimately health impacts. Increasingly a key pathway for translation goes through some form of systematic review process. The time for a research publication to be included in a systematic review may be one of the greatest lags in the overall translational process and may offer important opportunities for improving translational efficiency. Objectives: To examine distributions and median times from publication of a study until its inclusion in a Cochrane review; and to explore methods for assessing differences across type of intervention, disease area and research specialty. Methods: In the pilot work done to date 20 Cochrane reviews were selected across a broad spectrum of disease areas. Research publications included in the meta-analyses were identified. The date of each publication and the Cochrane review publication date were used to compute the duration (in years) from each publication to its inclusion. Distributions of durations were created and the longest, median, and shortest durations computed. Results: There were 405 (or an average of 20.15) research publications included in these 20 meta-analyses. The median of the median number of years from publication to inclusion in a Cochrane meta-analysis was 11.5 years. The longest durations ranged from 9 to 58 years. The shortest durations ranged from 0 to 19 years. Conclusions: These results are preliminary and more extensive studies are expected to be presented at the Cochrane Colloquium. Even so, the results raise concerns for translational research. If it typically takes over 11 years for a publication to be included (and the Cochrane meta-analyses might be expected to be among the quickest routes relative to most of the alternatives) this suggests that time to inclusion in a systematic review may be one of the most important barriers to translation from research to practice.