Status of <i>Diabetes Care</i>: New Challenges, New Concepts, New Measures—Focusing on the Future!

With the release of this issue, our editorial team is now at the 3.5-year mark in our tenure of overseeing the scientific aspects of Diabetes Care.During this time, we have done our best to keep you up to date on all changes, innovations, progress, and successes of the journal.We realize that with each issue we are responsible for providing new information to help health care professionals care for people with diabetes and to stimulate the research community in its quest for new discoveries and new treatment paradigms.At this time last year, our editorial on the status of Diabetes Care was titled "It Just Doesn't Get Any Better . . .or Does It?" (1).We also questioned whether in another 12 months we would "still be asking, 'Can it possibly get any better than this?'"With this report, we feel that question has clearly been answered in the affirmative.A new norm for excellence has been established at Diabetes Care.Over the last year, the number of new submissions reached record levels and the quality of the published articles (our primary metric) has never been higher.Moreover, the range of topics our journal covers is unlike that of any other.In the last year, we presented reports on new medications, new combinations of medications, critical reviews of safety of commercially available agents, extended outcomes of bariatric surgery, new data on the microbiome, latest developments in the artificial pancreas, staggering data on economic costs and analysis, emerging ideas on the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes, functional imaging studies, cognitive outcomes, and corneal nerve morphology, just to name a fewdthe list goes on and on!The journal also disseminates Scientific Statements, Consensus Reports, and Position Statements carefully prepared by the American Diabetes Association (ADA) (see Table 1 for highlighted articles).This past year, we were honored to publish the Position Statements "Type 1 Diabetes Through the Life Span," "Care of Young Children With Diabetes in the Child Care Setting," and "BMI Cut Points to Identify At-Risk Asian Americans for Type 2 Diabetes Screening" (2-4), as well as the joint Position Statement of the ADA and the European Association for the Study of Diabetes on the management of hyperglycemia in type 2 diabetes (5).Accompanying the update from the ADA/European Association for the Study of Diabetes was a report that examined the ADA Standards of Medical Care in Diabetes recommendations and trends in the quality of evidence supporting the recommendations (6).Over the 9-year period spanning from 2005 to 2014, the proportion of recommendations per year that were based on higher-level evidence increased from 39 to 51% (6).As we stated in the January 2015 update, the process for review from the ADA is working to the benefit of clinicians (7).In addition to the position statements, in October 2014, the journal published a Scientific Statement from the American Heart Association and ADA "Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus and Cardiovascular Disease" (8), and in April 2015, we published an incredibly comprehensive statement on insulin pump risks and benefits (9).A report from an ADA Consensus Conference on diabetic kidney disease was published in October 2014 (10).In addition to contributions from the ADA, we are privileged to feature noteworthy lectures from recent Scientific Sessions, and this year we published Dr. Seaquist's 2014