“In many parts of the world, people are living longer, and this has fuelled the need for more research in gerontology and related fields.”

I set up the journal in 1995 and was lucky enough to be able to bring together an exceptionally talented group of colleagues as the other editors. As they were all leading lights in their fields this enabled us to attract an international editorial board of great renown. The other editors, Dan Blazer, Steve Zarit, Bob Woods, and I, felt that Aging & Mental Health should be able to establish a special place in the academic literature as it covered both normal and abnormal aspects of aging and mental health and was both strongly interdisciplinary in nature and biopsychosocial in its approach. The first issue came out in 1997 and our priorities in the first few years involved making sure that we had sufficient innovative and high-quality papers, a growing readership, and a high reputation. Within a few years we were indexed by ISI® and Medline, indicating that our reputation and citation rate were both moving in the right direction.

We have worked hard over the years to have articles that are both high in quality and readable, and many people have been very complimentary about the journal. Our website has a very large number of hits per month with many people accessing articles and abstracts online. We have been online from the first issue, so having the complete set of issues available electronically is a plus. In addition, over the years our rejection rate has steadily increased to around 60%, and our page count has increased year to year. In the first year we had four issues of 96 pages, in 2003 we went up to bimonthly issues, and this year our issues will be bigger than ever at about 128 pages. This means readers can see more papers to interest them in each issue, and being bimonthly means papers get published faster. Also we have had a policy of promoting special sections within issues highlighted by an editorial. This means that relevant papers are conveniently grouped together. But because the special section is perhaps only half of the issue (or less) readers who are less interested in it still have a number of unrelated articles to peruse.

  Was there a change in policy or editorial direction that might account for this? 

We have meetings of the editors every couple of years and once we were convinced that Aging & Mental Health was firmly established as a high-quality journal, with a growing readership and an excellent reputation, we decided that the way forward was to continue to improve the quality, and the citation rate was a useful benchmark for this. The publishers have always been very strongly supportive of the journal, and we have editorial control of which papers go in which issue, so this gives us some scope for moving papers around into special sections, which seems to be popular with the many researchers who like the opportunity to see a related group of papers backed up by a thoughtful editorial. So the policy change has been to increase the number of special sections to at least one per issue where possible. In addition, increasing the page count is popular with authors as it reduces the time lag to publication. We are in the process of grouping online papers by theme to allow more systematic searching of the journal on our website and we feel that as this will improve ease of access to related papers so it may also increase our citation rate.

In many parts of the world, people are living longer, and this has fuelled the need for more research in gerontology and related fields. In the area of aging and mental health it has been a particularly exciting time since there has been a growing realization of the importance of psychosocial factors in the mental well being of the elderly.

There have been developments all across the field but I suppose the greater awareness of lifestyle factors in wellbeing and mental health in old age, and the developing understanding of the social and psychological dimensions of dementia have been two areas of special interest.

It has an interdisciplinary perspective which helps researchers and clinicians be more aware of ideas beyond their own area of expertise. In addition the emphasis on normal as well as abnormal aspects of aging and mental health means Aging & Mental Health has developed a clear and recognizable identity in the academic community.

Probably along the same lines as I mentioned above. But I think future studies will provide us with a greater understanding about the interplay between biological, social, and psychological factors in mental health and disease.

We would like to remain in the forefront of new research in this area.