The European Journal of Ageing at the start of a new decade

The European Journal of Ageing enters the new decade with its seventh volume. By now, the Journal has built up a substantial readership, a wide network of reviewers, and receives a growing stream of submissions from many countries in Europe as well as from many other parts of the world. We as editors are grateful for the active efforts of all contributors. The year 2010 also marks an important event: the Journal will receive an impact factor from Thomson ISI. This first impact factor is calculated for the year 2009, and will be based on citations in 2009 to Journal articles from 2007 to 2008. It is expected to be published by June, 2010. Please watch the Springer website for its release. No doubt, the publication of an impact factor will contribute to the viability of the Journal. Now we have put six years past us, it is time to take stock of the Journal’s development. Did the Journal live up to its mission statement to ‘understand ageing in Europe and the world over’? In other words, from which countries exactly are published articles originating? And to what extent do published articles reflect collaboration between countries? A further part of the mission statement is ‘to publish original articles on the social, behavioural and health-related aspects of ageing and encourage an integrated approach between these aspects.’ This leads to questions such as: To what extent were published articles interdisciplinary in content? Can a development be seen towards more interdisciplinarity? The editors have addressed these questions by building a dataset of all published articles through 2009. In this period, 159 articles were published, including editorials and reports. When the six editorials by the editors-in-chief are disregarded, this makes 153 publications. Excluding other editorials and reports, the article count is 146. Let us first address the origins of the published articles. In Table 1, it can be observed that the first volume was strictly European—which does seem proper for the opening issue of a European journal. This volume in fact consisted of one special issue, with all contributions invited by the editors. However, through the following years, the percentage of contributions from other parts of the world increased, with a maximum of 26% in volume 5. The bottom row of Table 1 shows the percentage of contributions that were co-authored by scholars from countries different from the first author’s. Volume 1 scores highest with 67% cross-national contributions, corresponding to the theme of this special issue: ‘Cross-European research’. It is good to see that in the subsequent volumes, the percentage of cross-national collaborative articles increased to 31 in volume 6. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the majority of publications stem from Northern and Western Europe. Specific countries that contributed most were Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom with around 20 articles each. From other parts of the world, Hong Kong and Lebanon are worth mentioning as contributors. Two parts of the world that are missing in this list are Eastern Europe and Latin America, although especially Eastern European scholars did co-author some contributions. Turning to the disciplinary content of the contributions, Table 2 shows the number of disciplines, broadly defined as ‘social’, ‘behavioural’, and ‘health’, addressed in D. J. H. Deeg (&) VU University Medical Centre/Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]