Acta Diabetologica is 50 and well: long live Acta!
Massimo Porta
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M. Porta (&) Department of Medical Sciences, University of Turin
, Turin,
Italy
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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)