Why is there a need for a new health-services research journal?
BM: Many of our discussions surrounded the fact that there are existing journals that publish this kind of work, but for those journals it is a secondary field. The traditional, or conventional, health-services journals cover a very broad range of topics, and Implementation Science, or quality-improvement research, is only one of them. There’s also a set of journals that we label the “quality and safety” journals, but these have a more applied orientation and target a different audience. The highly technical., theoretical, methodological papers that any field needs did not have a home. RC: What is VA’s role in the project? BM: HSR&D is providing in-kind support, and many of the planning- committee and editorial-board members are HSR&D investigators. VA’s Center for Information Dissemination and Education Resources (CIDER) in Boston serves as the editorial office for the journal. This in an international journal without any formal sponsor, but VA is recognized as the primary supporting
