Table 1.

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

Issue	Likely to be accepted	Likely to be rejected
Potential significance	Work contextualised within existing implementation research literature	Work not contextualised within existing implementation research literature
	Contribution to implementation research articulated and potentially significant	Contribution to implementation research not articulated or relatively minor
Field of interest	Healthcare and population health	Anything else
Effectiveness studies	Evaluating the effectiveness of implementation of an evidence-based practice or policy, or de-implementation of those demonstrated to be relatively ineffective or even harmful	Evaluating the effectiveness of a clinical, organisational, public health or policy intervention
Outcome	Health or health-related	Anything else
Implementation	Researching implementation	Doing implementation
Validity	Maximises internal and external validity as appropriate in the chosen study designs
Patient decision aids	Evaluations of the implementation of patient decision aids (of known effectiveness) into healthcare settings; involvement of healthcare providers	Initial development, pilot testing or evaluation of patient decision aids
Implementation 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
	Providing empirical and/or theoretical rationale
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 peer review by a nationally recognised research agency as part of their funding	Not been through peer review by a nationally recognised research agency 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)