Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology: A Success Story!

Diabetes technology (DT) has moved toward the center of diabetes care; it has become a major pillar of diabetes treatment. This is clearly driven by many factors, such as novel insulins, improved glucose monitoring, better pump therapy, and automated insulin dosing. In addition, digitalization has become a major focus, by using secure apps and accessing data wirelessly from all medical products used for diabetes treatment.

In view of all the ongoing developments in DT, there is a need for a platform that allows publication of new scientific and clinical data after a thorough and critical review. In the last 13 years, Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology (JDST) has developed itself into a leading medical journal in this respect; it is still the only fully electronic DT journal. In fact, JDST was the first purely electronic journal to cover any aspect of diabetes, technology, or otherwise. We are covering a broad range of topics, from clinical service management to basic science technology.

JDST received nearly 300 submissions as original manuscripts in 2018 (= 20-30 manuscripts per month), an increase of circa 6% from 2017. The annual overall submission rate of original manuscripts and other articles (e.g. Letters to the Editor) remained relatively constant around 450 in the last five years. As an indication of current submission quality, our acceptance rate decreased from 75% in 2015 to 65% in 2019. Of interest for authors is that the average time to first decision was 29 days in 2018, and 21 days later, accepted manuscripts were published on OnlineFirst.

Authors who publish in JDST get the best of both worlds for widespread visibility of their articles. Unlike open-access journals, JDST does not charge a publication fee to its authors. In contrast to many other diabetes journals, articles in JDST become free for downloading after one year, which makes them attractive to be read and cited. We believe that authors write articles to share their ideas rather than to enrich a publisher that charges high reprint fees indefinitely. Furthermore, JDST does not charge extra for color figures compared to black and white figures. The philosophy of JDST is to be respectful of authors. Our goal is to not only accept submitted articles, but seek out articles about cutting-edge topics, especially those related to science and technology.

In total, JDST published 6 issues consisting of 1,255 pages in 2018. In view of our digitalized world, it is probably more important nowadays that readers made nearly 220,000 full-text downloads. The top three downloads in the first four months of this year are:

1. Deborah A. Greenwood, Malinda Peeples, Kathy J. Fatkin, Perry M. Gee A Systematic Review of Reviews Evaluating Technology-Enabled Diabetes Self-Management Education and Support Volume 11 Issue 5; 10.1177/1932296817713506 (1027 downloads).

2. David Kerr, David C. Klonoff Digital Diabetes Data and Artificial Intelligence: A Time for Humility Not Hubris Volume 13 Issue 1; 10.1177/1932296818796508 (930 downloads).

3. Omar El-Gayar, Prem Timsina, Nevine Nawar, Wael Eid Mobile Applications for Diabetes Self-Management: Status and Potential Volume 7 Issue 1; 10.1177/193229681300700130 (757 downloads).

JDST publishes a special section with each issue covering an emerging technology. We work with guest editors to diversify our authorship. JDST is the only diabetes journal that publishes a special section focusing on an important technology with each issue.

In addition, modern publication scores like the Altmetric Attention score, the CiteScore (CS) (2.91), and the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) (1.196) in 2018 underline the widespread respect of JDST and the importance of publishing in this journal. Alternative metrics are becoming increasingly important in scholarly publishing; the Altmetric tracks mentions of journal articles across online platforms, public policy documents, and references in Wikipedia and uses an algorithm to score accordingly. The score is a helpful measure of online engagement and visibility, but it is not directly linked to citations or usage. The CS of an academic journal is a measure reflecting the yearly average number of citations to recent articles published in that journal. The SJR indicator is a measure of scientific influence of scholarly journals that accounts for both the number of citations received by a journal and the importance or prestige of the journals where such citations come from. In the same line of thinking, the publisher house, SAGE, is promoting the journal content through its Clinical Medicine Twitter feed which has 3102 followers.

Finally, we would like to thank the many individuals who have spent much time and effort in making JDST a successful and expanding journal. At this point, we, the Editors, thank our Production Editor, Annamarie Sucher, for her enthusiastic and effective management, providing rapid manuscript production. The Editorial Board of 54 members continues to play a key role in maintaining the quality and direction of the journal. We would also like to thank Diabetes Technology Society for their ongoing support of JDST.