Celebrating volume 10 of the European journal of ageing

Abstract

Celebrating one’s 10th birthday is something in a human life. Entering the 10th volume is certainly something to celebrate in a scientific journal’s life and certainly signals significantly more than to leave single-numbered volumes behind. The simple version may be ‘We made it the first 10 years—Let’s celebrate’. The more enriched (and selfassertive, if not proud) version may read as follows: ‘Yes, we have survived in good shape, we have a steady and constantly growing submission rate and we play an increasingly significant role in our relevant scientific community—Let’s celebrate’. We as editors have a tendency to go more with the second version, when it comes to the European Journal of Ageing. The journal is not only alive, it flourishes and there are indications that our journal now belongs to the group (together with, e.g. ‘Ageing & Society’) of premier European-based ageing research journals coming with an interdisciplinary ambition. The Journal’s visibility continues to grow. Our impact factor has reached 1,268 in 2011 (Ageing & Society: 1,165) and our most modest hope is for stability, but not without the ambition to see further increase. Amongst the 30 gerontology journals included in the social science citation index, the rank of our journal rose from 15th in 2010 to 13th in 2011. Again, as has been in the previous years, the number of full text downloads shows a steady growth, as does the number of subscribers to table of contents alerts. In parallel with these developments, the number of submissions is significantly growing and we had more than 140 submissions in 2012, compared to just over 100 in 2011. After having refreshed our editorial board in 2011, we made another significant step in 2012 to improve the quality of the journal’s scholarly platform, i.e. we added a third editor-in-chief: Prof. Howard Litwin from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prof. Litwin is an internationally acknowledged scholar in the social sciences of ageing and this is exactly the area in which the ‘old editors’, Dorly Deeg and Hans-Werner Wahl, felt additional expertise was needed. Prof. Litwin already provided a lot of service to the journal before he entered the editor-in-chief office and has been a guest editor of our special section on ‘Comparative contexts of care: findings from the survey of health, ageing and retirement in Europe’ (issue 9-1). Prof. Litwin has many liaisons with the European ageing research community and therefore is simply ideal to enrich the journal at the editors level. Effective in office since October 1st, 2012, Prof. Litwin now is in regular business and we are happy to have him with us (and he will of course become a co-author of our next editorial). We also hope to significantly shorten turn-around time with the trio. The papers in this issue nicely cover the three major areas of our journal, i.e. social, behavioural, and healthrelated ageing research. In the section ‘Critical positions in ageing research’ Liam Foster and Alan Walker take the 2012 European year of active ageing and intergenerational solidarity as a springboard to reflect upon gendered issues related to the concept of active ageing. Oliver C. Robinson’s article offers intriguing findings on age differences in a range of values studied across 12 European countries as part of the European Social Survey. An article by Bjorn Hallerod and colleagues addresses, once again after our mini special section in issue 9-3, retirement issues and H.-W. Wahl (&) Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany e-mail: h.w.wahl@psychologie.uni-heidelberg.de