Finishing Strong

W hile writing my last editorial for Diabetes Care fills me with a sense of accomplishment, more importantly I cannot help but feel grateful for the opportunity and the honor of being associated with the journal at a time of its tremendous growth and success. In the last 5 to 10 years, Diabetes Care has continuously grown in terms of the submission numbers (over 11,500 new articles in 4 years!), impact factor, and readership. It is well established as the leading diabetes clinical journal worldwide and is now published in several languages. Our Web site continues to be very popular as judged by the large number of daily " hits. " We continue to take pride in the fact that the journal, along with the American Diabetes Association, remains the major source of information about the disease internationally. Most importantly, I have learned a tremendous amount about diabetes from our authors and reviewers , as well as about the publishing process, which continues to evolve as new technologies become available. I look forward to handing over the expectation that Diabetes Care will continue to innovate and achieve new success as the premier journal in diabetes to the incoming team. This comes at a time of considerable challenges with financial and other obstacles restricting progress in research to find a cure and improve the lives for people with diabetes. Despite these obstacles and diminished research funding, we continue to attract high quality research covering all clinical aspects of the disease from epidemiology to everyday clinical care. Our submission rate continues to grow, which brings a down-side—the rise in our rejection rate—now over 80%. To help us produce an outstanding journal we need your help, and I must once again make the appeal for reviewers, pointing out that it is the responsibility of all authors, and indeed all readers, of the journal. It is a privilege to serve as a reviewer , and by critiquing articles in a timely way you are sharing your experience with the Editorial Committee and authors to assure that the highest quality papers are published in a timely manner. We do have many outstanding reviewers and are very grateful to them for their dedication to the journal. However, only 1,294 out of 6,745 eligible reviewers agreed to review. Those that review frequently and qualify for the Star Rewards program are sent a small token of appreciation at …