Abstract
Happy New Year! On behalf of the Editorial Team, we hope that your new year is marked by health and happiness, however you define them. We also hope that you will continue to support The International Journal of Aging and Human Development (IJAHD) as a reader, reviewer, and author. In this brief Editor’s Report, we want to share some of the milestones from 2019 and highlight some plans for 2020.
Looking Back
Established in 1970, and adopting its current title in 1973, The International Journal of Aging and Human Development is celebrating 50 years of disseminating cutting-edge scholarship in gerontology this year. Later this year, we anticipate sharing reflections about the 50th anniversary of the journal. For now, however, we want to express our appreciation for the support that you have shown over the past year. We are grateful when you contribute to the journal and when you use and cite relevant IJAHD articles in your own scholarship. We are pleased that due to your contributions, the impact factor of the journal has steadily increased to 1.175 in 2018, a 33% increase from the 2016–2017 period. Likewise, our 5-year impact factor of 1.30 represents a 17% increase from the 2016–2017 period. As a scholar, you can be proud when your work is published by the IJAHD.
The past few years have been busy and successful for the IJAHD! We received 238 new manuscripts in 2018, a 40% increase from 2017. Between January 1 and November 1, 2019, we had already received 276 manuscripts. We are pleased that in 2019, we have received scholarship from more than 40 nations. Submissions from the United States represent only 28% of the papers submitted for review. Thus, we take the “international” part of our charge seriously and welcome the scholarship of our colleagues from around the world.
Over the past few years, we have shared special issues on emerging and cutting-edge topics. For example, in 2017, we published a curated set of papers on cumulative disadvantage across the life span. In 2018, we highlighted findings about the correlates and consequences of “felt” or “perceived age.” These issues were well received and continue to influence subsequent scholarship in these areas. Recent special issues include the two-issue focus on international LGBT aging, published in the summer of 2019. These two issues included scholarship from around the world. Later this year, we are pleased to showcase the results of our 2018 call for papers on best practices in bringing gerontology into the undergraduate curriculum.
Significant effort from many hands is required to produce a high-quality journal that meets the needs of the field. Thus, before leaving this review of the past year, it is appropriate to acknowledge the support the IJAHD receives from its excellent Editorial Board and the comanaging/associate editors: Dr. Abigail Nehrkorn-Bailey and Dr. Amy Knepple Carney. We are also served by Dr. Danielle Nadorff, who as Book Review Editor will be increasingly visible in the new year. In 2020, we will again be publishing brief book reviews. Of course, we are grateful to the reviewers and reviewers-in-training, who provide necessary quality control for the scholarship disseminated in the journal.
Moving Forward
We value the opportunity to collaborate with both emerging and established scholars from around the world to disseminate high-quality scholarship. We are often asked how a scholar might better prepare their manuscript for positive reviews and eventual acceptance by the IJAHD. Below is a list of our top six suggestions.
WRITING: Send your best work and write clearly. Great writers often use programs, such as spell-check and grammar-check, to improve the readability of their papers. If a paper needs additional English-language edits, Sage Publishing offers author editing services at reasonable cost to authors. FORMAT: Use APA style and generally no more than 25 pages of text. Brief Reports are welcome. Limit tables and addenda. Avoid costly color figures. Although the Journal is able to publish color graphs, those costs are borne by the author. CONTENT: The IJAHD prefers quantitative work. Occasionally, we do accept qualitative pieces, but those include large samples, are theory-driven, and fit with other articles on a similar topic that we are highlighting. Empirical work which generalizes beyond the local sample is valued. INTEGRITY: Suggest unbiased reviewers from outside your own institution. Please use their institutional e-mail. Doing so allows us to verify that each reviewer is unique and qualified to participate in the peer review process. We also request that you suggest at least one reviewer from the Editorial Board. KEY WORDS: Select key words from the list provided to facilitate identifying reviewers and to help other scholars to locate your work after it has been published. Please note, words that appear in the journal’s title, like “aging,” are redundant for search engines. However, when authors add creative or idiosyncratic key words, the process of securing reviewers is often delayed. Thus, we strongly encourage authors to use the key words we provide. CITATIONS: Cite relevant scholarship from the IJAHD. If something related has been published in IJAHD in the past 5 or 6 years, it should be integrated into your scholarship. If an author cannot identify relevant work in the IJAHD, this may indicate that a different journal is a better fit. In general, limit the number of citations to only those that are most relevant. Although there is not a concrete rule for this journal, reference lists with the number of entries in excess of 50 are often seen as excessive.
Vision for 2020
As we prepare to celebrate the journal’s 50 years of service to the field, it is an appropriate time to rethink the vision of the journal. We publish 832 pages of content each year, which usually contains about 55 articles. However, over the past few years, we have focused on including more articles per issue. For example, in 2016 and 2017, we published 65 and 62 citable articles, respectively. In 2018, we published 80 citable pieces, a 29% increase from the previous period. By encouraging more succinct pieces, we can disseminate more scholarship from our authors. We hope to receive more brief reports and shorter articles, so that we can advance the field even more quickly.
In addition to encouraging submissions from new and emerging scholars, we have been actively encouraging our reviewers to partner with reviewers-in-training. We value the contributions that the next generation of gerontologists are currently making and will make in the future. If you are asked to serve as a peer reviewer, please invite a graduate student or junior colleague to co-review.
One way that we have tried to increase the usability of the scholarship in the journal is to bundle several related papers together in a single issue. We anticipate offering several such bundles each year. We are excited to start the year with high-quality work about cognitive aging. Included in the current issue are five articles from different international teams, each of which addresses various intersections with cognitive aging. We hope that you find these curated issues useful and we look forward to receiving your scholarship for review in the new year.