About Aging Medicine

Aging Medicine

Aging Medicine is an English-language open-access journal of geriatric medicine launched in 2018 and published in Beijing in association with Beijing Hospital and China's geriatrics community. It is the official English-language journal of the Chinese Geriatrics Society, and it is published by Beijing Hospital together with John Wiley & Sons, on the Wiley Online Library platform. It carries the ISSN 2475-0360, publishes four issues a year, and its full archive is available in PubMed Central. The journal was created for a specific purpose, stated plainly in its founding editorial: to give research on geriatrics in China an English-language showcase, as the world's then most populous country confronted the growing demand for health care that accompanies population ageing, and to welcome contributions from around the world to that conversation.

Founding in 2018 and the founding editors

The journal launched with its first issue in June 2018. The founding editorial, "Aging Medicine: a platform to understand health needs in rapidly aging populations," appeared in volume 1, issue 1, and was written by the journal's two founding co-Editors-in-Chief: Kenneth Rockwood of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and Jian-ye Wang of the National Center of Gerontology at Beijing Hospital. That pairing was itself a statement of intent. One editor was a leading international geriatrician known for work on frailty; the other led geriatrics at the Beijing institution that publishes the journal. The editorial records that the founding board was chosen both to honour the past of the specialty and to bring in its younger researchers, and it set the pattern that has defined the journal since: a Chinese institutional home, an international editorial outlook, and frailty and the care of older people at the centre of the agenda.

Beijing Hospital, the National Center of Gerontology and the Chinese Geriatrics Society

The journal's institutional base is Beijing Hospital, home to the National Center of Gerontology. An early article in the journal itself, "Geriatric medicine in China: The past, present, and future," records that geriatric medicine in China began to develop as a specialty in the 1950s and grew into an extensive national health-care network for older people, and that the establishment of the National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology in 2015 was a milestone: based at Beijing Hospital, the centre is charged with training programmes for geriatric care, coordinating national geriatric initiatives, monitoring disease trends in the elderly and issuing regular reports on senior health, alongside academic research. Aging Medicine is the publishing arm of that community. It is the official English-language journal of the Chinese Geriatrics Society, which distinguishes it from China's Chinese-language geriatrics titles: where those serve the domestic profession in Chinese, Aging Medicine was founded to present Chinese geriatrics to the world, and to bring world geriatrics to Chinese readers, in English.

A deliberately broad scope: the "broad tent"

The founding editorial describes Chinese geriatrics as a "broad tent": geriatricians in China work across several medical disciplines, including intensive care, neurology, emergency medicine and public health, united by a focus on the care of older people and informed by the cultural notion of filial piety, with its family and social duties toward older adults. The journal's scope mirrors that breadth. It welcomes papers across biology, medicine, social and cultural norms and expectations, public health medicine and health economics; articles on the care of older patients from a variety of medical and surgical specialties; and work in public health. Two interests were singled out at launch. The first is models of care from China, established and new, and innovations that can inform better care elsewhere. The second is the interface between traditional Chinese medicine and contemporary geriatric medicine, particularly for frailty syndromes such as delirium, chronic pain, functional limitations and bowel and bladder disorders. The editors also declared a special interest in how social factors affect the development of geriatric syndromes and the development and lethality of frailty, and in organisational questions — a health system in which primary care remains in development while annual health-check routines generate rich longitudinal information about individuals.

What the journal publishes

Aging Medicine publishes experimental and translational ageing research alongside clinical ageing research, and its contents include prevention medicine, palliative medicine, pharmacology and techniques applying to ageing medicine. The founding editors said they would be especially keen, in the first issues, to receive systematic reviews, including reviews that summarised the situation in China and brought the most relevant Chinese-language papers on a topic to an English-reading audience — a bridging function few other journals attempt. The journal's published record shows the range in practice: its early volumes include the history and prospects of geriatric medicine in China itself, and later volumes include work such as the 2020 "Ethical guidance for geriatric clinical research in China," which addressed the under-representation of older people in clinical research and set out guidance for the ethical review of geriatric studies. Consensus and guideline work from the Beijing Hospital community, research on sarcopenia assessed by the Asian Working Group for Sarcopenia criteria, and large population studies of older Chinese adults all sit within the same title.

Open access, indexing and measures of standing

The journal is fully open access: its launch editorial, for example, was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence, and the complete archive is held in PubMed Central, the free full-text archive of the United States National Library of Medicine, so any reader can read any article without a subscription. Bibliographic listings record the journal as indexed in PubMed, Scopus, Embase, the Directory of Open Access Journals and the Emerging Sources Citation Index of Web of Science. SCImago, working from Scopus data, records an SJR of 0.807 and an h-index of 25 for the journal, placing a title founded only in 2018 already within the ranked international geriatrics literature. For a directory reader, the combination that matters is practical: an English-language, open-access, PubMed Central–archived journal is fully discoverable and fully readable from anywhere, which is precisely the showcase function its founders described.

Readership and the questions the journal exists to answer

The founding editorial frames the journal's readership around a set of questions that ageing societies everywhere face, posed in their sharpest form in China. China's society is ageing rapidly, in relative terms — the proportion aged sixty and over — and in absolute terms. Filial piety shapes what families expect of care, which can make decisions about intensive treatment and palliative care fraught: when does doing "the very best" for a parent mean pressing ahead against stiff odds, and when does it mean accepting death and aiming for the best palliative care? Care available in urban areas differs from care in rural areas; social vulnerability matters more in late life, when mortality is highest; and health-system factors shape healthspan and lifespan across the life course. Aging Medicine exists to publish research that helps answer such questions — for China first, and, as its editors wrote, for the understanding of the health of older adults around the world.

How to access and cite it

The journal's home is its page on Wiley Online Library, under ISSN 2475-0360, where current issues and the archive are presented; the same archive is mirrored in PubMed Central, where articles can be found through PubMed searches on ageing and geriatric topics. Articles carry DOIs under the prefix 10.1002/agm2 — the founding editorial is DOI 10.1002/agm2.12018 — and the standard citation abbreviation is Aging Med. Readers should distinguish it from similarly named Wiley and other titles, such as Aging Cell, a separate open-access geroscience journal of the Anatomical Society, and from Age and Ageing, the long-established Oxford journal: Aging Medicine is the Beijing Hospital and Chinese Geriatrics Society title, founded in 2018, and the ISSN and DOI prefix settle any doubt.

Key facts

Journal: Aging Medicine. Place of publication: Beijing, China. Launched: 2018 (volume 1, issue 1, June 2018). Publishers: Beijing Hospital and John Wiley & Sons, on Wiley Online Library. Status: official English-language journal of the Chinese Geriatrics Society. Founding co-Editors-in-Chief: Kenneth Rockwood and Jian-ye Wang. ISSN: 2475-0360. Frequency: four issues a year. Language: English. Access: open access, with the full archive in PubMed Central; indexed in PubMed, Scopus, Embase, DOAJ and Web of Science (ESCI). Scope: geriatric medicine, ageing biology, care of older people, frailty, models of care, and the social, public-health and economic dimensions of ageing.