A Few Words of Introduction From Your New Diabetes Editorial Board Free

I would like to begin by thanking the American Diabetes Association for entrusting our editorial team to serve as the caretakers for Diabetes for the next few years. Personally, I would also like to thank the incoming associate editors (see below) and those who have agreed to join our editorial board for their commitment to the journal. The associate editors are experts in their areas of diabetes research and represent the heart and soul of the journal and the review process. They do yeoman’s work for the journal, from helping me to determine the appropriateness of the manuscripts for Diabetes to leaning on the editorial board and many colleagues to obtain the most expert reviews we can. The associate editors also assimilate the reviewers’ comments and ultimately recommend decisions to me for the manuscripts that they handle.

The current impact factor (8.784) for Diabetes suggests that the previous editorial teams have been identifying the correct science for the journal. Of course, that is why it is so crucial to have a strong editorial team: we are not interested in gaming the system to artificially inflate our impact factor but rather seek to ensure that we are publishing the most important diabetes-related research studies that not only break important new ground but also are rigorously conducted and ultimately reproducible. Importantly, the associate editors not only have extensive review and editorial experience but also are exceptional scientists with excellent judgment; I honestly believe that these are the best people for the job.

Peer review, of course, represents the cornerstone of the journal. In addition to our peer review of submitted manuscripts, we hope that you will provide peer review about how we are doing as an editorial board. We would like to hear any ideas you have regarding how the journal can be as transparent and rigorous as possible. Indeed, we have already received several excellent suggestions from members of former editorial teams and others, including mechanisms to improve rigor and reproducibility.

Although our sense is that most of the data that have crossed our desks thus far have been of high quality and the diligent efforts of the American Diabetes Association Panel on Ethical Scientific Programs have helped to correct the record in the small number of cases where inappropriately handled data have been published, cases of irreproducible or inappropriately manipulated data not only undermine confidence in published findings but also may waste the time and resources of those who seek to reproduce and extend such results. We are committed to doing as much as we can to ensure that everything we publish is rigorously executed and correct.

For some time, the journal has been forensically examining manuscripts for evidence of plagiarism and inappropriate image manipulation, but this really only serves to screen out those few manuscripts that suffer from actual malfeasance and can only get us part of the way to ensuring that we get it right the first time, all the time. We feel that the best way forward is transparency. We have recently taken an initial step in this regard by requiring that data not be presented in traditional “dynamite plunger” bar graphs that show mean ± SD (or worse, SEM) but rather as plots that show univariate scatter plots with all data points (for smaller samples) or as box-and-whisker plots or histograms (for larger data sets) (see “Manuscript Format”—“Figures” at http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/content/instructions-for-authors for more information).

In keeping with other journals, we are also considering a variety of steps to ensure that any crucial reagents used are appropriately validated and to make primary data more accessible to readers. As authors who have run up against serious administrative headaches with these requirements in other journals, however, we also realize the importance of not adding yet another layer of regulatory burden on our authors. Our first step in this regard is to encourage the submission of as much data as necessary to support the conclusions of a manuscript; to the extent that such data do not fit within the page and figure limitations of Diabetes, these should be included in supplemental online materials. Stay tuned over the next few months for additional changes in this same vein. And again, please let us know if you have thoughts or ideas relevant to this or other ways we can continue to strengthen Diabetes.