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Category: Project

Description: The challenge of implementing evidence-based innovations within practice settings is a significant public health issue the field of implementation research (IR) is focused on addressing. Significant amounts of funding, time, and effort have been invested in IR to date, yet there remains significant room for advancement, especially regarding IR’s development of scientific theories as defined by the National Academy of Sciences (i.e., a comprehensive explanation of the relationship between variables that is supported by a vast body of evidence). Research priority setting (i.e., promoting consensus about areas where research effort will have wide benefits to society) is a key approach to helping accelerate research advancements. Thus, building upon existing IR, general principles of data reduction, and a general framework for moderated mediation, this article identifies priority domains, aims, and testable hypotheses for IR and describes a scoping review protocol to identify and map the extent to which IR has (or has not) examined these priorities to date. The current scoping review and evidence map protocol has been developed in accordance with the approach developed by Arksey & O’Malley and advanced by Levac, Colquhoun, and O’Brien. As such, the methods are organized around the following five stages: (1) identifying research questions, (2) identifying relevant studies, (3) selecting studies, (4) charting the data, and (5) collating, summarizing, and reporting results.