Geriatrics

About Geriatrics

Geriatrics — Journal Profile

Geriatrics is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal devoted to the health and healthcare of older people, published by MDPI in Basel, Switzerland. It is identified by the electronic ISSN 2308-3417. The journal was launched in 2016, according to MDPI's journal listings, and it publishes on a semimonthly schedule, meaning that accepted papers appear continuously and are gathered into frequent issues rather than waiting for a single quarterly gathering. Its full title in library and indexing records is often shown as Geriatrics (Basel, Switzerland) or Geriatrics (Switzerland), a place qualifier added by cataloguers to separate this MDPI title from older and unrelated publications that have also used the single word Geriatrics. For citation and submission purposes, the ISSN is the reliable identifier: if a record does not carry 2308-3417, it is not this journal.

This profile explains what the journal publishes, how its peer review and open access model work, what its published metrics do and do not mean, who reads it, what kinds of manuscripts fit it best, and what an author should check before submitting. All journal-specific facts are drawn from the publisher's own pages and from major indexing listings consulted for this batch. Where a detail could not be verified from those sources, the profile says so plainly rather than filling the gap with a guess.

At a Glance

Why This Journal Exists

Populations are ageing in almost every region, and health systems designed around single diseases in younger adults cope poorly with the reality of later life: several long-term conditions at once, medicines that interact, gradual loss of muscle and mobility, memory change, and care that is shared among hospitals, primary care, families and social services. Geriatrics as a medical specialty exists to hold that whole picture together. A dedicated open access journal in the field serves two practical purposes. First, it gives clinicians and researchers a venue where the older patient is the starting point, not an exclusion criterion. Many trials and cohort studies still under-represent very old and frail participants, so a journal that welcomes work designed specifically around them helps correct a structural gap in the evidence base. Second, open access matters in this field because much of the readership works outside large universities — in community hospitals, nursing care, rehabilitation services and primary care — and may not have subscription access. Making every article free to read, under a licence that permits reuse with attribution, is therefore part of the journal's stated model, not a marketing extra.

MDPI's own description of the journal stresses complete reporting. Authors are encouraged to publish experimental and theoretical results in as much detail as possible, with no stated maximum length restriction, and to deposit full calculation or procedural material as supplementary files when it cannot fit in the article itself. That emphasis on reproducibility is especially relevant in geriatric research, where interventions are often complex — an exercise programme, a nutritional protocol, a medication review — and where a short methods paragraph is rarely enough for another team to repeat the work.

Scope in Detail

The publisher lists ten scope areas. Each one below is explained in practical terms so that a prospective author can judge fit honestly, rather than relying on the heading alone.

Geriatric biology

This strand covers the biological processes of ageing itself: cellular and molecular changes, inflammation, metabolic shift, and the mechanisms that link ageing biology to disease. Papers here are often laboratory or translational studies. A manuscript that studies a pathway in an ageing model and discusses its relevance to human ageing belongs here; a purely clinical audit does not.

Geriatric health services research

This is research about how care is organised and delivered: hospital pathways for older patients, discharge planning, community services, nursing home care, staffing models, costs, and policy. It also includes studies of healthcare systems and policies affecting elderly people, which the aims statement names explicitly. Health services papers need clear descriptions of setting and system, because a model that works in one country's funding structure may not transfer directly to another.

Geriatric medicine research

The clinical core of the journal: diagnosis, treatment and follow-up of diseases in older adults, multimorbidity, prescribing, and comprehensive geriatric assessment. Strong papers in this strand usually report age, frailty status and comorbidity carefully, because treatment effects in a fit 68-year-old and a frail 92-year-old cannot be assumed to be the same.

Geriatric neurology, stroke, cognition and oncology

This combined heading links brain health, cerebrovascular disease, cognitive disorders including dementia, and cancer in older patients. It reflects real clinical overlap: stroke, cognition and functional recovery interact, and cancer treatment decisions in later life must weigh life expectancy, frailty and patient preference alongside tumour biology. Papers on screening tools for mild cognitive impairment, on delirium, and on decision-making in older oncology patients all sit naturally in this area.

Geriatric surgery

Surgical care of older adults brings questions that general surgical journals sometimes treat as secondary: pre-operative assessment, anaesthetic risk, post-operative delirium, rehabilitation after operation, and whether an operation improves the outcomes the patient values. Work on elective and emergency surgery, on orthopaedic procedures after falls and fractures, and on peri-operative medicine fits here.

Geriatric physical functioning, physical health and activity

Gait, balance, falls, sarcopenia, strength, mobility and physical activity are central outcomes in later life because they predict independence. Studies in this strand include measurement work — for example, how well a gait speed or muscle measure identifies sarcopenia — intervention trials of exercise, and observational work on activity and decline. Authors should describe functional measures precisely and report them in units that other researchers can compare.

Geriatric psychiatry and psychology

Depression, anxiety, loneliness, sleep, bereavement and the psychological experience of ageing belong here, alongside the psychiatric aspects of dementia care. The journal's most-read material has included work on depression in older women and on how beliefs about ageing relate to cognitive and physical outcomes, which illustrates that this strand reaches both clinical and social-psychological research.

Geriatric nutrition

Nutrition in later life is not simply general diet advice applied to older bodies. Appetite change, dentition, swallowing difficulty, protein needs for muscle maintenance, vitamin status, malnutrition screening in hospital and care homes, and the interaction of diet with frailty all require age-specific study. Papers range from screening-tool validation to feeding interventions.

Geriatric epidemiology

Population-level work on the distribution and determinants of health in older groups: prevalence studies, cohort analyses, risk prediction, and studies of inequality in healthy life expectancy. Good epidemiological papers in this journal make their age bands, sampling frame and follow-up explicit, because results for people aged 65 and over can hide large differences between the young-old and the oldest-old.

Geriatric rehabilitation

Rehabilitation after stroke, fracture, surgery or deconditioning during illness is where many older patients regain — or lose — independence. This strand covers physiotherapy, occupational therapy, multidisciplinary rehabilitation programmes, assistive technology and outcome measurement. As with health services work, the intervention must be described in enough detail to be reproduced.

Article Types and Special Issues

The journal publishes original articles, critical reviews, research notes and short communications. That mix matters for planning. A full original article suits a completed study with methods and data that support detailed reporting. A critical review suits a focused question where the author can evaluate, not merely list, the existing literature. Research notes and short communications suit smaller but complete findings: a validation in a new population, a feasibility result, or a focused clinical observation with a clear message. Authors should choose the type that matches the evidence they actually have, rather than stretching a small study into a long article or compressing a major study until its methods become unclear.

Like other MDPI journals, Geriatrics runs Special Issues led by guest editors on defined themes. Recent themes advertised by the publisher have included hypertension in older adults, medical disorders and cognition in the elderly, healthy ageing and lifestyle medicine, and advances in risk assessment, biomarkers and management strategies. Special Issues group papers for discoverability and are promoted by the journal, but manuscripts submitted to them go through the same peer review route as regular submissions, and the same article processing charge applies. A planned paper for a Special Issue can begin with a short title and abstract sent to the editorial office for assessment, as the publisher's submission information describes. Authors should always check the deadline and the guest editor's stated scope on the live Special Issue page, because themes and dates change.

Peer Review, Ethics and Editorial Practice

Submissions are made online through MDPI's system after registration. The publisher states that manuscripts are refereed through a single-anonymised process: reviewers know the authors' identities, authors do not know the reviewers. Submissions should not have been published previously and should not be under consideration elsewhere, apart from the conference-proceedings exception the publisher notes. Authors are expected to present work well formatted and in good English, and the publisher offers a paid English editing service that authors may use before publication or during revision; using it is optional and is not a condition of acceptance.

On ethics, MDPI states membership of the Committee on Publication Ethics and describes a strict approach to plagiarism, data falsification and inappropriate authorship credit, with screening of submissions using iThenticate text-matching software. For a clinical field such as geriatrics, authors should read that as a practical checklist: obtain and report the correct ethics approval for work with patients or care-home residents, handle consent carefully where participants have cognitive impairment, register trials where registration is required, report funding and conflicts of interest fully, and make sure every listed author meets authorship criteria. Studies involving very old or cognitively impaired participants often need a documented consultee or proxy process; editors and reviewers in this field will expect to see it described.

Open Access, Licence and Charges

Every article in Geriatrics is published in full open access. The copyright note printed on articles states that copyright is retained by the authors and that the work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution licence, which allows others to share and adapt the work with appropriate credit. For authors, that means the article can be deposited, reused in teaching, and built upon by other researchers without seeking separate permission, provided the licence terms are followed.

The charge page lists an article processing charge of CHF 1,800, payable for papers accepted after peer review. The publisher states that the charge covers peer review administration, copyediting, typesetting, long-term archiving and journal management, that invoices are sent shortly after acceptance to the payment contact supplied by the authors, and that only invoices issued from an official MDPI address are valid. Payment can be made in several major currencies in addition to Swiss francs, and local tax may be added where applicable. Discounts may apply for authors whose institutions take part in the publisher's institutional open access programme. Two cautions are worth stating plainly. First, charges change over time, so an author should confirm the current amount on the live charge page before submitting, not rely on any secondary listing, including this profile. Second, many funders and universities cover such charges for funded research, as the publisher notes, but coverage is never automatic — check the funder's rules and the institution's agreement before submission, not after acceptance.

Indexing and Metrics — How to Read Them

The journal is covered in Scopus; MDPI announced that acceptance, and the journal appears in the publisher's PubMed-indexed journals listing with indexing information dated from 2019 in that table. Coverage in large databases affects discoverability: clinicians searching the medical literature and researchers searching multidisciplinary databases can find the articles through the routes they already use. Authors who need a specific database for a funder, employer or degree requirement should verify the current coverage for their exact need on the database itself, because coverage lists are updated and a journal-level listing does not guarantee that every article type is treated identically.

For metrics, MDPI's listing gives a 2025 Impact Factor of 2.4 attributed to Journal Citation Reports, and a CiteScore of 3.4. The Journals World thin record that this profile replaces carried an OpenAlex-based h-index of 45 and a count of about 1,207 works with roughly 13,959 citations at the time that record was compiled. Those numbers measure different things over different windows and from different databases, so they should not be averaged or treated as interchangeable. An impact factor is a short-window average of citations to recent items; a CiteScore uses a longer window and a different database; an h-index accumulates over the journal's whole history and grows with age and size. A younger journal launched in 2016 will naturally show a smaller accumulated h-index than a title published for fifty years, even if its recent articles are cited at a similar rate. The sensible use of these figures is comparative and modest: they show that the journal is established, indexed and cited, and they help an author compare venues in the same field and period. They do not predict the citations of any single paper, which depend far more on the topic, the study quality and whether the right community finds the work.

Older secondary summaries of SCImago data for this title show lower SJR values and a best quartile in the Q2 range across its subject categories, with coverage recorded from 2016. Quartiles also move by year and by category, and a journal can sit in different quartiles in ageing, gerontology and health categories at the same time. Any author who needs a quartile for a specific assessment year should take it from the current SCImago or Scopus record for that year, rather than from a profile page.

Who Reads and Cites the Journal

The readership implied by the scope is deliberately mixed: geriatricians and other physicians caring for older patients, nurses and allied health professionals, rehabilitation specialists, nutrition researchers, epidemiologists, health services researchers, psychologists and social-care researchers. That mixture is visible in the journal's Special Issue themes, which move from biomarkers and risk models to care models, lifestyle medicine and policy. For authors, a mixed readership rewards clear writing. A biomarker paper should explain its clinical relevance in plain terms; a care-model paper should explain its setting and staffing so that a clinician in another system can judge whether it applies. Abstracts carry extra weight in an open access journal because they are what searchers, clinicians and systematic reviewers screen first. State the population's age and frailty characteristics, the design, the main quantitative result and the limitation that matters most, in the abstract itself.

The journal is also a plausible source for systematic reviewers working on ageing topics, because its articles are free to retrieve and its themes overlap with common review questions: frailty assessment, falls prevention, nutrition screening, dementia care, and rehabilitation outcomes. Authors who want their work to be found and included in reviews should use standard terminology for conditions and interventions, report outcomes with the measures reviewers commonly extract, and deposit supplementary detail rather than shortening the methods.

Publishing Here — Practical Guidance

Before submitting, test fit with three questions. Is the older adult the centre of the study, rather than an incidental subgroup? Does the question belong to one of the ten scope areas above? Can the methods be reported in full, including ethics, setting and participant characteristics? If the answer to the first question is no, a general medical or specialty journal is probably a better home, even if some participants were old.

During preparation, follow the publisher's Instructions for Authors page for structure, reference style and file requirements, and check it again at submission because templates are revised. Prepare figures and tables to a standard that survives typesetting, resolve language issues before submission where possible, and be ready to respond to reviewer feedback without delaying the process unnecessarily. The publisher warns that papers should be well prepared and that unresolved issues at revision can cause delay or rejection; that is standard practice, stated openly.

On cost, confirm the current charge, any institutional discount, and who will pay, before the manuscript is accepted. On timing, note the semimonthly, continuous model: there is no need to wait for a themed issue unless a Special Issue genuinely matches the work. On rights, remember that authors retain copyright under the CC BY licence, and plan any reuse of third-party material — a scale, a questionnaire, an image — accordingly, with permissions secured in advance.

Strengths, Limits and Honest Cautions

The journal's strengths are clarity of identity, full open access with author-retained copyright, a broad but recognisably geriatric scope, coverage in major databases, and a publishing model that allows long, fully reported papers. Its limits follow from the same model. An article processing charge is a real barrier for unfunded teams, even with institutional agreements. A broad scope means the journal competes for attention with large general medical titles as well as with long-established geriatrics titles that carry decades of accumulated prestige. And because it publishes frequently and in Special Issues, authors should evaluate the specific article, editor and issue they are joining, as they should with any high-volume open access venue, rather than relying on the journal name alone.

No impact factor, quartile or charge figure in this profile should be treated as permanent. Metrics are recalculated, charges are revised, and indexing coverage is reviewed. The stable facts are the identity facts — title, ISSN, publisher, scope and model — and even those should be confirmed on the publisher's live pages at the moment of submission.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of Geriatrics?
2308-3417. Use it to confirm identity, because other publications have used similar names.

Who publishes Geriatrics?
MDPI, based in Basel, Switzerland.

Is Geriatrics open access?
Yes. Articles are published in full open access under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, and authors retain copyright.

What does it cost to publish?
The publisher's charge page listed CHF 1,800 for accepted papers at the time of research. Confirm the current figure on the live page before submitting, and check for institutional discounts and funder coverage.

Is Geriatrics peer-reviewed?
Yes. The publisher describes a single-anonymised peer review process for submissions that pass initial checks.

What subjects does it cover?
The health and healthcare of elderly people across ten listed areas, from geriatric biology and medicine to nutrition, epidemiology, rehabilitation, psychiatry and health services research, including healthcare systems and policy.

When was it launched and how often does it publish?
MDPI listings give a launch in 2016. It is described by the publisher as a semimonthly journal with continuous publication of accepted papers.

Is it indexed in Scopus?
Yes — the publisher announced its acceptance for Scopus coverage, and it appears in major database listings. Verify current coverage in the database itself if a specific requirement depends on it.

Sources and Verification

Publisher aims, scope, licence, ethics and contact pages for Geriatrics on mdpi.com; publisher article processing charge page for Geriatrics; publisher announcement of Scopus coverage; publisher journal listings giving launch year, impact factor and CiteScore; SCImago-derived secondary summaries for historical ranking context; and the Journals World record for this post, which supplied the OpenAlex-based counts quoted as such. Facts were cross-checked between the publisher pages and listings before inclusion. Charge and metric figures are time-sensitive and should be rechecked on the live publisher pages.