Abstract
Welcome to 2017 and issue 1 of our 16th year in production. This is a significant year for the journal as from 2017, and going forward from volume 16, the Dementia journal will be available eight times a year instead of its previous six. There will be a slight decrease in pages per issue, but, overall, the increase in issue numbers means that the Dementia journal will be able to publish more articles in our core area of interest and further reduce the wait times between article acceptance and hard copy publication. The increase in issue numbers also means that the Innovative Practice part of the Dementia journal, which is edited by Jo Moriarty, will now be published three times a year instead of the previous two; so, from 2017 (volume 16), Innovative Practice will appear in issues 2, 5 and 8. Also, going forward, our special editions will now appear in issue 6 of each year; while we do not have a special edition in volume 16, we have commissioned special editions for volumes 17 (2018), 18 (2019) and 19 (2020). More about this next year. We would like to thank Sage for their support of the journal and its ambitions. Our second area of good news to share in this Editorial Note is that the impact factor of the Dementia journal has now risen from 0.911 in 2015 to 1.063 in 2016, ranking it 19 out of 32 in gerontology journals. Thank you to all our authors, reviewers, readers and administrative staff for making this happen. We are also pleased to report that following the Dementia journal’s Editorial Board meeting at the Gerontological Society of America’s annual conference in Orlando in 2015, we were able to enhance the Aims and Scope of the Dementia journal and reaffirm our commitment to scholarship as part of the publication process. We are planning to hold an Editorial Board meeting in San Francisco in July 2017 as part of the World Congress of Gerontology.
Over the course of 2016, we have had a few changes on the Editorial Board. We said goodbye to Els Steeman (Belgium) and would like to thank Els for all her hard work, reviews and support of the Dementia journal since her time with us. And we welcomed Ian James (UK), Nick Jenkins (UK) and Andrew Robinson (Australia) to the Editorial Board. We are fortunate to have the support of such esteemed colleagues. Indeed, one of the most interesting initiatives in recent years has come from the Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre at the University of Tasmania, Australia, where Andrew Robinson is a co-director, and the development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in dementia. For example, and only by means of illustration, the Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre offer the hugely influential (and free) ‘Understanding Dementia’ MOOC: http://www.utas.edu.au/wicking/understanding-dementia and the ‘Preventing Dementia’ MOOC: http://www.utas.edu.au/wicking/preventing-dementia. In the UK, University College London has developed ‘The Many Faces of Dementia’ MOOC (which is run by ‘Future Learn’): https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/faces-of-dementia. Such initiatives highlight the world-wide need for education in dementia and the fast-paced innovations in technology that have somehow come together to make our world a smaller and more connected place in which to live, learn and share.
Finally, for those readers who have an interest in social media, the Dementia journal’s twitter handle is: @DementiaJournal Jo Moriarty does a fantastic job in maintaining this part of our activity. Please follow us.
Our first Editorial of 2017 is written by Pam Roach from Canada on the topic area of young onset dementia and employment.