About Asian Journal of Gerontology and Geriatrics

Asian Journal of Gerontology and Geriatrics

Overview and identity

The Asian Journal of Gerontology and Geriatrics, abbreviated Asian J Gerontol Geriatr and known as AJGG, is a peer-reviewed journal published in Hong Kong whose first issue appeared in 2006. Its ISSN is 1819-1576. It is the official joint publication of the Hong Kong Geriatrics Society (HKGS) and the Hong Kong Association of Gerontology (HKAG), and is published through Hong Kong Academy of Medicine Press.

The journal publishes peer-reviewed articles in English and Chinese on the medical, social and rehabilitation sciences of older populations. It appears half-yearly, and it also publishes abstracts from the annual scientific meetings of its two owning societies. Its website is ajgg.org, and its editorial office can be contacted at ajgg@ajgg.org.

Origins: a merger of two Hong Kong journals

AJGG was created by combination. In an editorial marking the journal's fifth anniversary in 2010, co-chief editor E. M. F. Leung explained that the journal came into being through the combination of the Hong Kong Journal of Gerontology and the Journal of the Hong Kong Geriatrics Society in 2006. The combined effort of the Hong Kong Geriatrics Society and the Hong Kong Association of Gerontology, he wrote, was to promote knowledge exchange and scientific development in geriatric medicine and gerontology in Asia.

The merger made institutional sense. Gerontology — the multidisciplinary study of ageing, including its social and psychological dimensions — and geriatrics — the medical care of older people — are pursued by overlapping but distinct communities in Hong Kong, each with its own society and its own earlier journal. A single joint publication gave both communities one refereed platform and gave the journal a bilingual, interdisciplinary remit from birth. A history of geriatric medicine in Hong Kong published in the journal in 2026 likewise lists the publication of the Asian Journal of Gerontology and Geriatrics in 2006 among the specialty's milestones.

Scope: medicine, society and rehabilitation in ageing

The journal's scope, as demonstrated by its published contents, spans clinical geriatric medicine, the social sciences of ageing and rehabilitation. Its issues contain articles from sociology to health care, including health, mental health and surgical interventions in older people and the care of older people, as its fifth-anniversary editorial observed. Recent issues show the same breadth: the first issue of volume 20 (2025) included qualitative research on healthcare providers' perspectives on caring for older people in a Hong Kong emergency department, a review of vaccination for older people in the post-COVID-19 era, a case series on outreach physiotherapy for geriatric patients with COVID-19, and case reports on a collaborative care model for end-of-life support in a residential care home.

That mixture — emergency care, preventive medicine, rehabilitation and residential care — reflects Hong Kong's own ageing-services landscape, in which hospital geriatrics, community assessment services and residential care homes for the elderly (RCHEs) form one system. The journal's editorial in 2025 discussed comprehensive geriatric assessment and its demonstrated effect in improving functional outcomes and reducing acute hospital stays and discharges to residential care, themes that run through the journal's clinical content.

The Hong Kong context: fifty years of geriatric medicine

The journal documents a specialty with deep local roots. Geriatric medicine in Hong Kong developed from the establishment of geriatric wards at Princess Margaret Hospital in 1975 and expanded through the founding of the Hong Kong Geriatrics Society — the journal's 2026 history records the society as founded in 1981 and brought together the professionals of the growing specialty — and the publication of the Hong Kong Geriatrics Society Curriculum in Geriatric Medicine in 2003. Community services followed, including the Visiting Medical Officer and Community Geriatric Assessment Service collaborative scheme launched in 2004 and the Hospital Admission Risk Reduction Programme for the Elderly in 2006, the journal's own founding year.

The need the journal serves intensified after 2020. Its 2025 editorial recorded that more than 1.8 million people in Hong Kong had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 and that of the 9,287 COVID-19 deaths reported in Hong Kong in 2022, 96.9 percent were older people — statistics that explain the journal's sustained attention to vaccination, outreach care and residential-home medicine in its recent volumes.

Editorial governance and ethics

AJGG's journal policies, published on its website, set out an explicit governance model. The journal is a joint official publication of the HKGS and HKAG, but the two societies play no part in its editorial policy, and the Editorial Board is allowed complete editorial freedom. The journal is primarily funded by the two societies and also receives income from advertising and direct subscriptions. Editorial Board members are appointed by the Chief Editor or Editors and serve two-year terms, which may be extended after review.

The journal's ethics policies follow the standard codes of conduct and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Core Practices. The Editorial Board is responsible for deciding which submitted manuscripts are published, and authors who wish to appeal a decision may contact the editorial office with their reasons and an account of how the manuscript could be revised to address the limitations identified. Editors associated with the journal over its history include T. W. Au Yeung and Edward M. F. Leung, the latter as co-chief editor at the fifth anniversary, and Christopher C. M. Lum of the Institute of Ageing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, author of its 2025 editorial on care for older adults.

Indexing and metrics

AJGG is indexed in Scopus, with coverage recorded from 2012 in SCImago-based summaries. Those summaries place it in the Geriatrics and Gerontology category in the fourth quartile, with an h-index of about 10 and an SJR of about 0.16 in recent releases; citation-based impact scores reported by analytics services are low, under 0.5. Such figures are typical of a small, bilingual, regionally focused society journal whose readership is concentrated among practitioners in Hong Kong and Asia rather than among high-volume citing researchers.

The journal's articles carry DOIs with the prefix 10.12809; the 2025 editorial, for example, is Asian J Gerontol Geriatr 2025;20(1):4 with DOI 10.12809/ajggv20n1-ed, and articles are published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence in the journal's current practice, with copyright held by the Hong Kong Geriatrics Society and the Hong Kong Association of Gerontology. Volume numbering confirms continuity: volume 20 appeared in 2025 and volume 21 in 2026, counting from the 2006 founding.

Readership and value

For geriatricians, gerontologists, rehabilitation specialists, nurses, social workers and policymakers concerned with ageing in Asia, AJGG offers something larger international journals rarely provide: research conducted in Hong Kong's own service settings, in both English and Chinese, covering the residential-care, community and hospital interfaces where most older people's care actually happens. Its meeting abstracts additionally capture the current work of Hong Kong's two ageing societies.

The journal is best approached as a society record and a regional evidence source rather than a high-impact-factor title. Researchers can read it at ajgg.org, cite it as Asian J Gerontol Geriatr, and find its post-2012 content through Scopus. Two decades after the 2006 merger that created it, it remains the joint voice of Hong Kong's geriatrics and gerontology communities and a durable window onto the care of one of the world's most rapidly ageing populations.

Bilingual publishing and regional reach

AJGG's decision to publish in both English and Chinese is more than a courtesy: it determines who can use the journal. Frontline staff in Hong Kong's residential care homes, community nurses and social-care professionals work largely in Chinese, while academic geriatrics communicates internationally in English. A bilingual journal lets a study of Hong Kong care practice be read by the practitioners whose work it describes and by the regional researchers who cite it. Combined with the abstracts it publishes from the annual scientific meetings of the Hong Kong Geriatrics Society and the Hong Kong Association of Gerontology, that bilingual, practice-facing character makes the journal a working tool for Hong Kong's ageing-services community as well as a scholarly record for Asia's gerontology researchers.