Table 1.

Summary of issues that influence the likelihood rejection without review of articles submitted to Implementation Science

Issue	Likely to be accepted	Likely to be rejected
Field of interest	Healthcare and public health	Anything else
Effectiveness studies	Evaluating the introduction of an intervention/evidence-based practice of known effectiveness	Evaluating the effectiveness of a clinical, organizational, public health, or policy intervention
Outcome	Health or health-related	Anything else
Implementation	Researching implementation	Doing implementation
Validity	Maximizes internal and external validity as appropriate in the chosen study designs
Patient decision aids	Evaluations of the introduction of patient decision aids (of known effectiveness) into healthcare care settings; involvement of healthcare providers	Initial development or pilot testing of patient decision aids
Implementation (Knowledge Translation) direct to patients	Outcomes referring to evidence-based practice with some involvement of healthcare providers	Other types of outcomes
Intervention development reports	Prepared and submitted prior to the reporting of the effectiveness of the intervention	Post hoc submission
	Going to be, (robustly) evaluated	Not going to be (robustly) evaluated
Process evaluation	Submitted contemporaneously with or following report of intervention effectiveness	Process evaluations submitted in advance of the conduct of the main effectiveness analysis (it cannot be clear if they are explaining an effect or the absence of an effect)
	Process evaluations that take account of the main evaluation outcomes	Process evaluations that do not take account of the main evaluation outcomes
Pilot studies	If appropriate criteria for conduct	No justification for conduct
	If appropriate degree of inference	Overclaim on basis of results
	If there are plans for further evaluation
Protocols	Been through (inter)national level peer review as part of their funding	Not been through national level peer review as part of their funding
	Received ethics review board approval	Not received ethics review board approval
	Submitted prior to data cleaning or analysis	Have begun data cleaning or analysis (may not apply to some qualitative studies)