The persistent 17-year span between discovery and application of evidence in practice has been a rallying cry for implementation science. That frequently quoted time period often implies that implementation needs to occur faster. But what do we really know about the time required to implement new evidence-based practices into routine settings of care. Does implementation take 17 years? Is implementation too slow? Can it be accelerated? Or, does a slower pace of implementing new evidence-based innovations serve a critical function? In many cases—pandemics, health inequities, urgent social crises—pressing needs demand timely implementation of rapidly accruing evidence to reduce morbidity and mortality. Yet many central tenets of implementation, such as trust, constituent inclusion, and adaptation, take time and may require a slow pace to ensure acceptability and sustained uptake.

To date, little attention and scant data address the pace of implementation. Speed is a rarely studied or reported metric in implementation science. Few in the field can answer the question, “how long does implementation take?” Answering that question requires data on how long various implementation phases take, or how long it takes to achieve implementation outcomes such as fidelity, adoption, and sustainment. Importantly, we lack good data on how different implementation strategies may influence the amount of time to achieve given outcomes.

To advance knowledge about how long implementation takes and how long it “should optimally” take, this collection seeks to stimulate the publication of papers that can advance the measurement of implementation speed, along with the systematic study of influences on and impacts of speed across diverse contexts, to more adequately respond to emerging health crises and benefit from emerging health innovations for practice and policy. In particular, we welcome submissions on 1) methodological papers that facilitate development, specification, and reporting on metrics of speed, and 2) data-based research (descriptive or inferential) that reports on implementation speed metrics, contextual factors and/or active strategies that affect speed, or the effects of implementation speed on important outcomes in various contexts.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

• Data based papers documenting pace of moving through various implementation phases, and identifying factors (e.g., implementation context, process, strategies) that affect pace of implementation (e.g., accelerators and inhibitors)
• Data based papers from multi-site, including multi-national, studies comparing pace of innovation adoption, implementation, and sustainment across various contexts
• Data based papers reporting time to implementation in the face of urgent social conditions (e.g., climate change, disaster relief) Papers on how to accelerate time to delivery of treatment discoveries for specific health conditions (e.g., cancer, infectious disease, suicidality, opioid epidemic)
• Data based papers on the timeliness of policy implementation, including factors influencing the time from data synthesis to policy recommendation, and from policy recommendation to implementation
• Span of time needed to: achieve partner collaboration, including global health partnerships adapt interventions to make them more feasible, usable, or acceptable achieve specific implementation outcomes (e.g., adoption, fidelity, scale-up, sustainment) de-implement harmful or low-value innovations, or to identify failed implementation efforts
• Effect of implementation pace on attainment of key outcomes such as constituent engagement, intervention acceptability or sustainability, health equity, or other evidence of clinical, community, economic, and/or policy benefits.
• Papers addressing the interplay between pace and health equity, speed and sustainability, and other considerations that impact decision-making on implementation
• Methodological pieces that advance designs for testing speed or metrics for capturing the pace of implementation

This Collection welcomes submission of a range of article types. Should you wish to submit to this Collection, please read the submission guidelines of the journal you are submitting to, i.e., Implementation Science or Implementation Science Communications, to confirm that type is accepted by the journal you are submitting to.

Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission systems in Implementation Science or Implementation Science Communications. During the submission process you will be asked whether you are submitting to a Collection, please select "Advancing the Science and Metrics on the Pace of Implementation" from the dropdown menu.

Articles will undergo the standard peer-review process of the journal they are considered in Implementation Science or Implementation Science Communications and are subject to all of the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

The Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer-review process. The peer-review of any submissions for which the Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.

This Collection is organized by:

• Gila Neta, PhD, MPP, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, United States
• Enola Proctor, PhD, Washington University in St. Louis, United States
• Alex Ramsey, PhD, Washington University in St. Louis, United States

The field of implementation science has amassed a large number of frameworks^3,4,5. These are sometimes also called models, but because the term “model” is used in many other contexts in research, we will use the term “framework.” While many of these frameworks express a goal of supporting research in the implementation of evidence-based practices and programs, researchers and especially new entrants to the field continue to express confusion and uncertainty about how to use existing frameworks and which to use for what purposes. New frameworks are often developed without clarity about how they fit within the existing corpus of frameworks.

Despite the large number of frameworks ⁴, their use often reflects a lack of deep understanding of the content of the frameworks. Implementation researchers often describe frustration with existing frameworks while continuing to use them. A major issue is that once published in a peer-reviewed venue, there is no clear path to suggest changes or updates to the frameworks. A few, such as the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR)⁶, the Exploration, Preparation, Implementation, Sustainment (EPIS) framework^7,8, and the RE-AIM framework⁹, have been updated through processes determined by a relatively small group of researchers¹⁰; others remain essentially fixed as they were published, or updated once but not again^11,12. This can lead to reification of the frameworks in their original form. These issues may constitute a major “sticking point” for advancing the science of implementation, as well as contributing to complexity for implementation practitioners who use frameworks as tools developed through the science. Emerging global health priorities, including health equity, structural racism, coloniality, climate and planetary health, digital transformation, and policy implementation, raise questions about whether existing frameworks adequately capture power, history, resource constraints, political economy, community agency, and cross-setting adaptation¹³. The increased geographic scope of published studies adds to concerns about whether theories and frameworks current in the literature support the broader scope.

We also note the importance of understanding the function of existing frameworks, most clearly addressed in the seminal 2015 paper by Nilsen describing an initial taxonomy of theories, models, and frameworks in implementation science⁵. We note that this paper is now over a decade old. Proposing additional taxonomic categories of frameworks, models, and theories is an important step yet to be taken.

This background informs this collection proposal. We are calling for manuscripts to address the issues, which may include methods (what methods can be used to update or extend existing frameworks), perspective or commentary manuscripts (why is this important), and empirical papers offering new insights, updates, and extensions of existing frameworks. We would also welcome papers that explicitly focus on theorizing based on existing frameworks, focusing on prediction and explanation rather than description¹⁴. However, manuscripts proposing new frameworks will be considered only if they clearly demonstrate how the proposed contribution builds on, revises, synthesizes, tests, or challenges existing frameworks, and why a new framework or a substantial extension is necessary. The existing body of frameworks and models within implementation science and practice constitutes an important catalog of knowledge. Our goal is to build on that existing knowledge.

Examples of topics include, but are not limited to:

• Innovative papers that develop new substantive theories or significant theoretical extensions to existing theories
• Methods for classifying and categorizing existing frameworks
• Proposing new domains and constructs for existing determinant frameworks
• Synthesizing across existing process frameworks to describe common elements and areas of departure
• Practical guidance on how to use existing tools such as the “Assess the Dissemination and Implementation Models Webtool” or useful new tools and approaches to help people select and use existing frameworks (these are likely to be assessed for Implementation Science Communications rather than Implementation Science)

This Collection welcomes submissions of a range of article types. Should you wish to submit to this Collection, please read the submission guidelines of the journal you are submitting to, i.e., Implementation Science or Implementation Science Communications, to confirm that the type is accepted by the journal you are submitting to.

Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission systems in Implementation Science or Implementation Science Communications. During the submission process, you will be asked whether you are submitting to a Collection. Please select "Breaking Frameworks: Revisiting, Extending, Integrating, and Theorizing Implementation Frameworks" from the dropdown menu.

Articles will undergo the standard peer review process of the journal in which they are considered, Implementation Science or Implementation Science Communications, and are subject to all of the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

The Editors have no competing interests with the submissions that they handle through the peer-review process. The peer review of any submissions for which the Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.