Asian Journal of Gerontology and Geriatrics

About Asian Journal of Gerontology and Geriatrics

Asian Journal of Gerontology and Geriatrics — Journal Profile

Asian Journal of Gerontology and Geriatrics is the official joint publication of the Hong Kong Geriatrics Society and the Hong Kong Association of Gerontology. It publishes peer-reviewed articles in English and Chinese covering the full range of medical, social and rehabilitation sciences related to older people, and it exists to improve practice, extend knowledge and spread research findings across the broad fields of gerontology and geriatric medicine in Asia. The journal is published twice a year, in June and December, is fully open access, and is produced for the two societies by Hong Kong Academy of Medicine Press. Its standard short form is AJGG.

This profile is anchored to the journal's own website at ajgg.org — its About page and its journal policies page above all — to an early editorial published in the journal that records its founding, and to the OpenAlex source record resolved from its print ISSN at checking time. Where a detail could not be verified from a consulted source, the profile says so instead of guessing.

At a Glance

• Full title: Asian Journal of Gerontology and Geriatrics
• Short form: AJGG; cited as Asian J Gerontol Geriatr
• Print ISSN: 1819-1576
• Second ISSN recorded in OpenAlex: 2958-9428 (listed alongside the print ISSN in the OpenAlex source record)
• Owners: Hong Kong Geriatrics Society and Hong Kong Association of Gerontology — the journal is their official joint publication
• Publisher of record on the journal website: Hong Kong Academy of Medicine Press
• Country: Hong Kong
• Official website: ajgg.org
• Frequency: Two issues a year, in June and December, as stated on the journal website
• Languages: English and Chinese, as stated on the journal website
• Access: Fully open access; articles licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, as stated on the journal website
• Indexing stated on the journal website: Scopus and EMcare
• Fields: Geriatric medicine, gerontology, rehabilitation and social sciences of ageing

History: Two Hong Kong Journals Become One Asian Journal

The journal's own fifth-anniversary editorial, published in 2011, records its origin directly. The Asian Journal of Gerontology and Geriatrics came into being in 2006 through the coming together of the Hong Kong Journal of Gerontology and the Journal of Hong Kong Geriatrics Society. The combined effort of the Hong Kong Geriatrics Society and the Hong Kong Association of Gerontology — one body rooted in clinical geriatric medicine, the other in the wider study of ageing — was to promote knowledge exchange and scientific development in geriatric medicine and gerontology across the Asia region. The first volume therefore dates to 2006, and OpenAlex, which records 2006 as the first publication year of its harvested record for this source, agrees with the journal's own account.

The logic of the merger is still visible in the journal's contents. One parent was a gerontology journal, concerned with the social, psychological and policy dimensions of ageing; the other was a geriatrics society journal, concerned with the medicine of older patients. The combined journal deliberately holds both: its editorials move from residential care accreditation and the digital divide among older people to end-of-life care, frailty and the organisation of geriatric services, and its research articles range from fall prevention in nursing homes to the sociology of successful ageing in Sri Lankan older people. An early editorial described the ambition as stimulating academic research in health care and community care for older people in the region and sharing among academics and practitioners working in aged care in Asia — a regional mission, not only a Hong Kong one, built into the title itself.

Continuity since 2006 has been steady rather than dramatic. The journal marked its fifth anniversary in 2010–2011, its volumes continued in the June and December rhythm, and recent issues on its website include volume 19 in 2024, whose editorial pages still carry the same joint-society identity and the same regional brief. The journal also publishes abstracts from the annual scientific meetings of its two owning societies, which ties the periodical directly to the professional calendar of Hong Kong geriatrics and gerontology.

The Owning Societies and the Publisher

Ownership matters here because the journal's policies page is explicit about the division of labour. The journal is a joint official publication of the Hong Kong Geriatrics Society and the Hong Kong Association of Gerontology. The two societies fund it primarily, with further income from advertising and direct subscriptions, and commercial advertisers have no influence on editorial decisions. Crucially, the policies page states that the two societies play no part in the editorial policy of the journal and that the editorial board is allowed complete editorial freedom. The board is appointed by the chief editor or editors, members serve for two years with possible extension after review, and the board is responsible for deciding which submitted manuscripts are published, judging importance, originality, clarity and relevance to the journal's scope.

Production sits with Hong Kong Academy of Medicine Press, named as publisher on the journal's website with its Hong Kong contact details. The Academy is the publishing home of Hong Kong's medical academy and its colleges, which places this journal inside the territory's formal medical publishing infrastructure while its editorial direction remains with the two societies' board. For authors, the practical consequence is a society journal run to academy-press standards: stated ethics policies following the core practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics, a fair-play statement that manuscripts are judged on intellectual content without regard to an author's background, and open licensing under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 with copyright transferred to the journal on acceptance, as the website states.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The About page defines the scope, and this profile follows it closely. The journal publishes peer-reviewed English and Chinese articles representing the full range of medical, social and rehabilitation sciences related to older people. It is committed to improving practice, extending knowledge and developing, promoting and disseminating research findings in the very broad fields of gerontology and geriatric medicine, and it aims to provide linkages for regional and international research, education and practice.

Three features of that scope deserve emphasis. First, the bilingual policy: articles in English and Chinese are both within the journal's stated remit, which matters in a region where much clinical and social-care research is first written in Chinese. Second, the breadth across the medical–social divide: a frailty intervention, a nursing-home staffing study, a rehabilitation trial and a study of older people's internet use can all be in scope, provided the population is older people and the question concerns their health, care or lives. Third, the regional lens: the journal is edited in Hong Kong but its brief is Asia, and its contents reflect that, with contributions and subjects from across the region.

OpenAlex's topic record at checking time shows the published centre of gravity. Its largest clusters for this source were frailty in older adults; geriatric care and nursing homes; nutrition and health in aging; pharmaceutical practices and patient outcomes; balance, gait and falls prevention; and palliative care and end-of-life issues. That is a recognisably clinical-geriatric profile with a strong care-settings strand — exactly what the merger of a geriatrics society journal with a gerontology journal would be expected to produce two decades on.

Editorial Process, Ethics and Open Access

The journal's policies page sets out the governance described in the publisher section: board appointment and terms, board responsibility for publication decisions, the editor-in-chief's decision role, and evaluation on intellectual content alone. Its ethics policies follow standard codes of conduct and the core practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics. The About page adds the access and rights framework: the journal is fully open access, articles are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, copyright of all articles is transferred to the journal on acceptance, the journal is self-archived, and the names and e-mail addresses entered on the journal site are used only for the journal's stated purposes.

One practical warning follows from the licence. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 is the most restrictive of the common Creative Commons licences: readers may share the work with attribution for non-commercial purposes, but may not distribute modified versions. Authors who need a more permissive licence for funder compliance should raise that with the editorial office before acceptance rather than after. Article charges and a detailed submission timetable could not be verified from the pages consulted for this profile and are not stated here; the journal's Guide for Authors and Submission pages on its own website are the place to confirm both.

Metrics and Citation Record

All figures in this section come from the OpenAlex source record resolved in the foreground from the print ISSN 1819-1576 at checking time — source S4210215479, whose ISSN list is 1819-1576 together with 2958-9428, whose listed host organisation is the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine, and whose alternate titles include a pinyin form reflecting the journal's Chinese-language side. OpenAlex listed the journal with 137 works, of which 128 were recorded as open access, and 318 citations to those works. Its summary statistics gave a source h-index of 9, an i10-index of 7 and a two-year mean citedness of 0.195. OpenAlex also marked the source as a core source in its classification and gave Hong Kong as the country and 2006 as the first publication year, matching the journal's own history.

Read in context, this is a small society journal — two issues a year produce a limited article count — with a citation record typical of a regional specialist title whose readership is concentrated among clinicians and researchers in ageing across Asia. Its influence is better judged by who reads and uses it: the About page records a print circulation of more than 2,000 copies distributed to members of the two societies, physicians, physiotherapists and social scientists, and to hospitals, nursing schools and tertiary institutions in Hong Kong, with electronic distribution to international geriatrics and gerontology organisations. For a practitioner-researcher in Asian aged care, that targeted reach is the point of the journal.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal's own About page states its indexing plainly: the journal is indexed in Scopus and EMcare. This profile repeats that as the journal's own statement, which is the strongest form of the claim available from a consulted official source; authors for whom Scopus coverage is a formal requirement should still confirm current coverage in Scopus itself. Articles carry digital object identifiers under the prefix 10.12809 — the journal's 2024 and 2026 article pages and PDFs show DOI forms such as 10.12809/ajgg followed by article identifiers — so individual papers are persistently citable and discoverable through Crossref-based tools, and OpenAlex harvests the journal as a distinct source, as the metrics section shows. The Directory of Open Access Journals interface returned a server error throughout checking for this batch, so no claim about that directory is made in either direction.

How to Submit

Start at ajgg.org and read the Guide for Authors and the Submission pages, then the journal policies page, before preparing a manuscript. Write for the journal's actual scope: older people as the population, and a medical, social or rehabilitation science question about them. English and Chinese are both stated languages of the journal. Make the regional relevance visible — an Asian setting, population or comparison is the journal's home ground — and follow the ethics framework the journal declares. Keep in mind the stated rights model, copyright transfer on acceptance and CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licensing, and confirm any charges and the current submission route on the journal's own pages, since those details could not be verified for this profile. Society meeting abstracts are also published, so members of the two societies presenting at their annual scientific meetings should check how that route works.

Who Should Publish Here — and Who Should Look Elsewhere

The strongest fit is research on older people from an Asian setting or team: geriatric medicine, frailty and falls, dementia care, residential and community care, rehabilitation, nutrition in ageing, end-of-life care and the social sciences of ageing. Practitioner-authors — geriatricians, nurses, physiotherapists, social workers — are the journal's core community, and its bilingual policy lowers the barrier for authors whose first academic language is Chinese. Authors with work outside ageing, or who require a permissive open licence or a very large international citation audience, should look elsewhere; authors should also verify charges and current indexing directly with the journal where those are decisive.

The Journal and Hong Kong's Ageing Story

Hong Kong gives this journal a distinctive laboratory and a distinctive duty. It is one of the most rapidly ageing societies in the world, with a health system that delivers much of its care through a public hospital authority, a large residential-care sector for older people and a professional geriatrics community small enough to know itself. The journal's pages reflect that setting: editorials address the quality and accreditation of homes for the elderly, the safeguarding of vulnerable older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic through telemedicine and community treatment facilities, the training pipeline of geriatricians and the public education work of the geriatrics society itself. A 2026 article in the journal counted 236 geriatric medicine specialists in Hong Kong as of late November 2024 — a figure that conveys both the maturity of the specialty and how much of the territory's older-person care must be carried by primary care, nursing, therapy and social-work colleagues, all of whom are named in the journal's distribution and readership.

That is why the journal's founding combination still makes sense. Geriatric medicine alone cannot answer questions about residential care quality, family change, digital exclusion or end-of-life practice in the community; gerontology alone cannot answer questions about frailty, prescribing or falls. By holding the clinic, the care home, the family and the policy system inside one pair of covers twice a year, and by doing so in both English and Chinese, the journal serves as the shared professional memory of Hong Kong aged care while speaking to the wider Asian region that faces the same demographic turn a few years behind. Authors reading it for fit should look for that whole-person, whole-system habit in its pages and write to it.

Similar Journals

Close neighbours include other Asian geriatrics and gerontology society journals — the journal of the Indian Academy of Geriatrics and the Korean gerontological society periodicals are in the same regional conversation — and international titles in geriatric medicine and ageing and society research for authors seeking a wider readership. The Asian Journal of Human Services, profiled separately on this site, is a complementary neighbour: it treats older people as one group among several served by human services, whereas this journal is devoted to ageing alone, from clinic to community.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was the journal founded? In 2006, by combining the Hong Kong Journal of Gerontology and the Journal of Hong Kong Geriatrics Society, as its fifth-anniversary editorial records.

What are its ISSNs? The print ISSN is 1819-1576. OpenAlex records a second ISSN, 2958-9428, for the same source; that second number was not part of the stored record this profile was prepared from and is noted here from the OpenAlex record.

Who owns and publishes it? It is the official joint publication of the Hong Kong Geriatrics Society and the Hong Kong Association of Gerontology, produced by Hong Kong Academy of Medicine Press, with complete editorial freedom for its board as the policies page states.

How often does it appear and in what languages? Twice a year, in June and December, publishing peer-reviewed articles in English and Chinese.

Is it open access? Yes — the journal states that it is fully open access, with articles under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 and copyright transferred to the journal on acceptance.

Where is it indexed? The journal's own website states Scopus and EMcare. Confirm current Scopus coverage in Scopus if it is a formal requirement.

What citation record does it have? At checking time OpenAlex recorded 137 works, 318 citations, a source h-index of 9 and a two-year mean citedness of 0.195.

What could not be verified? Article charges and a detailed review timetable could not be verified from the pages consulted; use the journal's Guide for Authors and Submission pages for those.

Sources and Verification Notes

Principal sources consulted in the foreground: the journal's official website at ajgg.org (About the Journal, Aims and Scope, indexing and metrics, open access, copyright and publisher statements; Journal Policies page on society roles, board terms and ethics); the journal's 2011 anniversary editorial recording the 2006 combination of its two predecessor journals; article pages on ajgg.org showing the 10.12809 DOI prefix; and the OpenAlex source record S4210215479 resolved through the ISSN endpoint for 1819-1576.