Reflecting on a Year at the Helm of Diabetes Care

A year has passed since we were given the responsibility of leading Diabetes Care. In 2023, perhaps the most momentous highlight for all of us from a health perspective has been the sense that we are on the better side of recovery from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This realization is in part due to the rapid application of technology that allowed for the development of mRNA vaccines for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). These vaccines have saved many lives and appropriately resulted in the awarding of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman.

On the other hand, we sadly continue to observe human suffering. As a component of this suffering, we keep witnessing the unnecessary loss of lives of innocent people in wars raging in many regions of the world. This hurt affects us all in one way or another.

Layered on top of these tragic events, ongoing social and economic disparities continue to impact the health of our global population, from illnesses that create acute loss to those that are more long term. Global health inequities affect the individual, their families, and the societies in which they live. Diabetes is counted among these and is now estimated to affect 529 million people worldwide (1). This disease disproportionately affects the most vulnerable, and its burden and consequences vary according to health care availability and affordability.

It was with the impact of diabetes and its comorbidities in mind that we accepted the challenge to edit Diabetes Care. In this effort, we have taken the approach of bringing forward information we hope will improve outcomes for those with diabetes. To do so, we have introduced several new initiatives and have modified others. A few of them are discussed below. We hope that, collectively, these initiatives continue to make Diabetes Care the preeminent journal dedicated solely to improving outcomes for people with diabetes.

As a starting point, we restructured the editorial leadership of Diabetes Care to work toward a more equitable and diverse team in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and citizenship. We also used this opportunity to modify the makeup of the editorial group by inviting many of the best early- and midcareer investigators to serve as editors and members of the editorial board. This process continues to evolve as our vision and needs change, but on balance, we feel it has been more successful than we could have imagined. The insights and contributions made by our editorial members have been critical to the function and direction of the journal. In an upcoming spring issue, we are excited to commence a new biographical series to introduce you to members of the editorial team.

We also changed the way the editorial team handles submitted manuscripts. By having manuscripts evaluated by the team more frequently each week, we have been able to reduce the time to the first decision from 21 to 10 days. In the case of those submissions that are deemed at the outset to be unlikely to attain sufficient priority for publication, a decision is typically rendered in <3 days. By this approach, we believe we are allowing authors to get their work published more rapidly by not having the manuscript tarry while going through what would be a full, yet likely unsuccessful, review. For those that do go through a formal review, a first decision is now rendered in an average of 29 days and those that are published get accepted within 86 days following the requisite reviews and revisions. Accepted articles are then copyedited and appear online about 26 days after acceptance. We believe that by reducing the average times for each of these milestones, we are better serving not only the authors but also our readership by bringing key findings to the field more rapidly.

While citation metrics are just one method to provide information on the performance of a medical journal, they are still key to consider. Important citation metrics include the Impact Factor, the most publicized measure, and we are proud to say that, for Diabetes Care, it is more than two times greater than it was a decade ago (16.2 vs. 7.8). This puts the journal in the top 6 of the 145 journals considered to be part of the endocrinology and metabolism discipline, whether they focus on basic or clinical science or publish original research or review articles. Aside from this measure, as one of the most prolific and highly cited journals in the field of endocrinology and metabolism, Diabetes Care ranks first in Eigenfactor. This metric is considered a measure of a journal’s total importance to the scientific community; it is calculated according to the number of articles a journal publishes and the number of citations it receives, with citations from high-impact journals weighted more heavily in the calculation. These comparisons make us aware of the wonderful opportunity we have been afforded to continue to maintain the quality of a formidable and vital publication and the responsibility that comes with it.

To broaden accessibility to the essential knowledge we are disseminating, we have expanded outreach in two forms. First, we are commissioning reviews on a variety of topics and asking experts in the field to lead the teams that author them. Again, in keeping with our focus on broadening opportunities for those earlier in their careers, we are encouraging these submissions to include early- and midcareer scientists as authors in strategic positions. Second, Alice Cheng and Michael Rickels, two of our associate editors, host our Diabetes Care “On Air” podcast, a new venture that produces fresh episodes at least monthly. In these, authors of feature articles are interviewed, providing greater insight into their work published in the journal. These interviews are followed by an interchange between the two editors about some of the new science that appears in that month’s issue. You can access the podcast at most sites where you get your favorite podcasts. Both of these initiatives are available for free, even if you are not a member of the American Diabetes Association (ADA). We thank the ADA for allowing us in these two ways to disseminate information as widely as possible across the globe without charge.

New partnerships have also been a theme we have embraced over the past 12 months. The first of these, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), commenced last month with the publication of the first report in a new series we are calling “CDC Epidemiologic Reports on Diabetes Care and Prevention.” Our plan is at least twice a year to publish in-depth reports on topics that are current and important. As part of this partnership, we will also hold a special symposium at the ADA’s Annual Scientific Sessions in June, where a selected topic will be addressed by a speaker from the CDC, accompanied by two additional presentations aligned with the symposium’s theme. The other new partnership is one we launched with our ADA sister journal Diabetes and our compatriot journal Diabetologia, the official journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD). Together, we plan to address topics that are ripe for further understanding and thereby potentially help drive the research agendas of funding organizations. The initiative, which has a three-pronged approach, was launched at the EASD Annual Meeting, held in Germany this past October, with the theme being the microbiome in diabetes. It started with a forum at which international experts gathered to discuss aspects of our current knowledge and to identify where the science needs to focus next. The results of this discussion were presented two days later in a symposium at the meeting, and the proceedings will be simultaneously published in all three journals later this year. The next forum will be held this coming June at the ADA Scientific Sessions and will focus on type 1 diabetes.

Being at the helm of Diabetes Care, we are constantly striving to bring the latest information to you, our readership. Our sense at the end of the first year of this responsibility is that we are settled in. However, we are not done but have just begun. Going forward, we will endeavor to expand on our roles as custodians of the journal to bring forward the latest and most important information in the hope it will be of benefit to people living with diabetes and the people who care for them. As we continue to move forward, we are, of course, interested in your feedback, so please continue to send us your comments and suggestions.