According to a report from the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory Coordinating Center, journal editors and peer reviewers were familiar with pragmatic clinical trials and their designs and analytic approaches, but they often asked for more information about intervention implementation.
The report was published this week in the Living Textbook of Pragmatic Clinical Trials.
The report’s authors invited the principal investigators of the first several completed NIH Collaboratory Trials to confidentially share the journal peer reviews of manuscripts reporting the trials’ main outcomes. They independently reviewed the peer reviews of the manuscripts to note common questions and themes.
“We did not generally observe that reviewers were unfamiliar with pragmatic clinical trials or had difficulty understanding the design and analytic approaches of the studies,” the authors reported. Instead, they found that the reviewers in many cases requested more information about implementation outcomes, implementation strategies, and intervention content.
Although many of the NIH Collaboratory Trial teams have published separate implementation-focused papers, the report suggests that reviewers may want or expect some of this information to be included with the report of primary study outcomes to aid in the interpretation of results.