Acta Diabetologica is 50 and well: long live Acta!

Acta Diabetologica, Jan 2014

Massimo Porta

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Acta Diabetologica is 50 and well: long live Acta!

Massimo Porta 0 0 M. Porta (&) Department of Medical Sciences, University of Turin , Turin, Italy - Acta Diabetologica has gone through a number of important changes this past year. First, and for the better, its Impact Factor enjoyed an impressive rise. Second, more worryingly, its authoritative and well-experienced Editorsin-Chief stepped down after achieving this rewarding result. Fortunately, Professors Guido Pozza and Renato Lauro, to whom heartfelt thanks are due for their steady guidance of the journal, will continue to make their experience available as Founding Editor and Honorary Editor, respectively. Thirdly, having been established in 1964 as Acta Diabetologica Latina, the journal celebrates its 50th birthday and is the oldest active diabetes journal in Europe. It is with such awesome thoughts in mind that this new Editor-in-Chief took charge last June. His predecessors led Acta Diabetologica to first league among Endocrine and Metabolism publications and entrusted him with the ability to continue their good work. Some of the action to this effect will go under the sign of continuity and some will have to take note of changing times. Rigorous selection of the manuscripts received by the Editorial Office will continue to be enforced, jointly with the two long-serving Managing Editors, Professors Massimo Federici and Antonio Secchi, and with old and new members of the Editorial and Advisory Boards. We shall have to be tough and maintain the current 80 % rejection rate. However, more importantly, we shall strive to be as fair as possible. This Editorial Board believes that quality is more important than quantity and that publishing good articles is better than publishing few articles. No good papers left behind should be our motto, probably not shared by all those authors who will see their submissions rejected. Alas, journal Editors do not make many friends! But a good Impact Factor is not all there is to life of journals, editors, authors, and publishers. More important is the choice of an editorial line that will do its modest share to genuinely stimulate original research in the field of human diabetes and metabolism. This may sound matter of fact but a number of signals emerging from the world of science should be taken very seriously indeed. Karl Popper based his view of scientific progress on the concept of Falschungsmoglichkeit or empirical falsification of data, meaning that current wisdom can constantly be proven false when newer concepts are applied to previous knowledge and suggesting that science tends to evolve by correcting itself [1]. But in Poppers time, scientific research was still an educated hobby for affluent gentlemen. In his Gattopardo, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa provides us with the memorable description of a Sicilian prince who, among other nightly enjoyments, could afford a private observatory to explore the terse skies above his land and even discover one or two new celestial objects, which he duly communicated to the learned societies of his day [2]. Until perhaps the first half of the twentieth century, many new things could be described with a lot of amateurial dedication, sharp intelligence, and relatively affordable means. Today, research is a profession, costly, competitive and requiring complex technical skills, deep knowledge and full-time dedication. Rewards derive mostly from the dissemination of ones own results, and in todays publish or perish environment, powerful forces tend to derail research(ers) from pursuing the straight line of advancement of knowledge for the ultimate benefit of mankind. Pressure to publish is sometimes stronger than prudence. Staff at a leading biotech firm were able to replicate the results of only 6 out of 53 landmark papers in cancer [3] and those at another large pharmaceutical firm could only reproduce a quarter of 67 seminal studies [4] in a trend that increasingly appears to apply to most fields of research. There are many possible explanations for failure to reproduce the Results of a given publication, and they do not necessarily involve misconduct. Sometimes, the truth, only the truth but not all the truth, is detailed in Materials and Methods. Experimental conditions may change in subtle ways from one laboratory to another, and inexplicable variables can be summed up in terms of technicians green thumb. Nonetheless, pressure to publish may lead to divulgate results before they are solidly validated. Results will be published more easily if they describe positive findings. Negative results find it increasingly harder to make it to the presses: according to a survey, the rate of published negative results across science dropped from 30 to 14 % between 1990 and 2007 [5]. This way, publication bias leads to consolidate findings and prevents dissemination of negative results, leading unaware researchers to beat the same sterile tracks until, eventually, a positive result is found (by convention, 1 out of 20 results is s (...truncated)


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Massimo Porta. Acta Diabetologica is 50 and well: long live Acta!, Acta Diabetologica, 2014, pp. 1-3, Volume 51, Issue 1, DOI: 10.1007/s00592-014-0554-6