About The International Journal of Aging and Human Development

The International Journal of Aging and Human Development — Full Journal Profile

The International Journal of Aging and Human Development (IJAHD) is a long-established peer-reviewed journal of gerontology and adult development published by SAGE Publishing. It carries print ISSN 0091-4150 and electronic ISSN 1541-3535, matching the identifier pair on its Journals World record (post 349904). The journal was established in 1970 under the title Aging and Human Development and took its current title in 1973, which is why bibliographic coverage for the current title is recorded from 1973 onward. For more than fifty years, under four editors and two publishers, it has featured multidisciplinary scholarship on aging processes and older adults, publishing eight issues a year and more than a thousand pages of scientific content annually.

SAGE states the journal's emphasis plainly: the emphasis is upon psychological and social studies of aging and the aged, while the journal also publishes research that introduces observations from other fields that illuminate the human side of gerontology, or that uses gerontological observations to illuminate questions in other fields. A more recent focus includes midlife development as well. In its instructions to authors, SAGE adds that all papers are reviewed for scholarly merit and for the extent to which they advance valid knowledge about human development and aging across disciplinary perspectives within the social sciences, including psychology, sociology, anthropology and economics, that interdisciplinary perspectives are strongly encouraged, and that preference is given to papers making a new and notable contribution of general theoretical significance.

About half of the journal's publications, 47 percent in the editor's own account, come from international colleagues, and the current issue illustrates that reach: Volume 103, Number 4 (2026) carries studies of subjective isolation and loneliness, post-retirement happiness among Indonesian state-enterprise employees, life satisfaction and meaningful activity, yoga and healthy aging in a nationally representative Indian sample of 28,482 adults aged 60 and over, digital literacy and depression in older adults with chronic disease, and older adults' adaptation to climate change in Türkiye. This profile describes the journal's history, scope, review standards, metrics and submission route in full, and notes the thinner duplicate Journals World listing for the same journal and ISSN pair (post 12962) so the two records are not mistaken for two journals.

History: From Aging and Human Development to an Eight-Issue SAGE Journal

The journal began in 1970 as Aging and Human Development and was renamed The International Journal of Aging and Human Development in 1973. That two-step origin explains small inconsistencies authors meet in databases: the founding year appears as 1970, while title coverage begins in 1973. Both dates are correct; they refer to the original title and the current title respectively. The journal's early decades were spent with its first publisher before moving to SAGE, and its editor-in-chief Julie Hicks Patrick of West Virginia University, writing in Innovation in Aging in 2023, summarised the lineage as more than fifty years under four editors and two publishers.

Scale is part of the journal's identity. Eight issues a year and over a thousand pages of scientific content place it among the larger society-style gerontology journals, able to carry a steady flow of empirical studies rather than a handful of papers per issue. Its archive includes work that helped define empirical gerontology, such as the description of the Normative Aging Study as an interdisciplinary longitudinal study of health and aging, the rationale and reliability work for the Comprehensive Assessment and Referral Evaluation (CARE), and widely cited experimental work on aging and posture control and the changes in sensory organisation and muscular coordination that accompany it. Authors submitting today are writing into that archive, and reviewers know it.

The journal's centre of gravity has widened over time. Alongside its traditional strength in later-life psychology and social gerontology, the editors have added an explicit interest in midlife development, recognising that trajectories of health, work, family role and wellbeing in the forties, fifties and early sixties shape outcomes in old age. Midlife papers are therefore in scope when the developmental link to aging is argued clearly, not merely asserted.

Aims and Scope in Detail

The primary purpose of IJAHD, in SAGE's words, is to publish methodologically sound empirical studies that advance the theoretical and applied knowledge base of human development and aging. Contributions may take the form of an idea, a discovery, a methodology, or a connection between basic and applied developmental science of aging. Although expository and review papers will be considered if they contain a strong scientific focus, the journal is not primarily a review outlet; a review must do scientific work, organising evidence into a testable or decision-relevant synthesis, rather than summarising a literature narratively.

Topic coverage follows the psychological and social study of aging: cognitive aging and everyday cognition; personality and self-concept across adulthood; social relationships, loneliness and social support; wellbeing, life satisfaction and meaning in life; retirement and post-retirement adjustment; caregiving and intergenerational relations; health behaviour, chronic disease and self-rated health in older samples; digital literacy and technology use in later life; and adaptation to environmental change, as the recent climate-change study shows. Work from sociology, anthropology and economics is welcomed when it speaks to development and aging, and the journal explicitly encourages interdisciplinary framing.

Two scope boundaries deserve emphasis. First, the journal is a social-science gerontology journal, not a clinical geriatrics or biomedical aging journal: a purely biomedical study with no psychological or social developmental component belongs elsewhere. Second, general adult-development papers with no aging relevance will struggle; the developmental question must connect to aging processes, older adults, or life-course trajectories that culminate in later life, with midlife work admitted under the journal's stated newer focus when that connection is made explicit.

Reading the Current Journal: What Recent Issues Show

The contents of Volume 103, Number 4 show how the scope operates in practice. A hybrid panel study separates between-person and within-person levels in the association between subjective isolation and loneliness across age groups, a design that matches the journal's methodological expectations. A coping-strategy training study tests post-retirement happiness among Indonesian state-owned enterprise employees, an applied intervention in a non-Western employment system. A study of meaningful activity engagement links activity meaningfulness, not just activity frequency, to life satisfaction. The yoga study uses the Longitudinal Ageing Study in India, Wave 1 (2017 to 2018), with 28,482 respondents aged 60 and over, showing the journal's appetite for large nationally representative datasets analysed with a clear developmental question.

Two further papers mark emerging territory. The digital literacy and depression paper models self-rated health as a moderator in older adults with chronic diseases, combining technology, mental health and health perception in one design. The climate adaptation paper uses qualitative phenomenological interviews with 24 adults aged 65 and over in urban and rural Eskişehir, demonstrating that rigorous qualitative work is genuinely in scope when the method fits the question. Authors should read two or three recent issues before submitting; the fastest way to calibrate fit, article length, abstract style and discussion depth is against papers the current editors have actually accepted.

Special issues are part of the model. SAGE's author instructions invite proposals for special issues that fit the aims and scope. A credible proposal names a guest editor team, a coherent developmental theme, a realistic contributor list spanning more than one country or discipline, and a timetable matched to the eight-issue calendar. Speculative proposals assembled around a single research group rarely succeed; the journal's international and interdisciplinary character should be visible in the proposal itself.

Editorial Leadership and Governance

The editor-in-chief identified in the journal's recent scholarly record is Julie Hicks Patrick of West Virginia University, whose 2023 Innovation in Aging presentation on publishing with IJAHD is the most direct published account of the journal's editorial expectations. In that account the editor stresses timely reviews and positive decisions depend on basics done well: well-chosen keywords, suggestions of unbiased reviewers, correct formatting, sound writing mechanics, clearly articulated methods, and a sound theoretical basis. Authors should treat that list as the editorial office's own checklist, because it is.

Editorial board composition and associate editor assignments change over time and are listed authoritatively on the SAGE journal site. Before submitting, confirm the current editor-in-chief and board there rather than relying on any secondary profile, including this one, since appointments announced after this profile's research date would supersede it. Correspondence about a live submission goes through the manuscript system rather than by direct email to editors, which keeps the review record complete and auditable.

The journal's stated support for new investigators is a governance point worth noting. The editor's account says IJAHD is delighted to support new investigators as they navigate dissemination. In practice that support shows up as developmental reviewing: clear decision letters and a preference for guiding promising work through revision rather than rejecting fixable manuscripts outright. It does not lower the methodological bar, and first-time authors should still have a senior colleague read the manuscript before submission.

Peer Review, APA Style and Submission Mechanics

Manuscripts are submitted in APA style through the journal's ManuscriptCentral site, as directed in the SAGE instructions to authors, with formatting following the APA Style guidance SAGE references. APA compliance is checked as part of editorial handling: headings, reference list format, statistical reporting, table structure and abstract conventions should follow the current APA Publication Manual. Submissions with pervasive style errors signal carelessness to reviewers before the science is even read, so a dedicated style pass is a practical necessity, not a courtesy.

Review evaluates scholarly merit and contribution. The preference for papers of general theoretical significance means the introduction must do more than identify a gap; it must state what changes in developmental theory, measurement or applied understanding if the findings hold. Methods must be articulated clearly enough to be evaluated and, in principle, replicated: sampling, inclusion criteria, measures with psychometric evidence in older samples where relevant, analytic strategy matched to design, and honest treatment of missing data and attrition in longitudinal work.

SAGE offers optional open access through the SAGE Choice programme for authors who need or want it, with details on the SAGE Choice site and funder-compliance guidance on the Journal Author Gateway. The default route remains subscription publication with no requirement to pay. Authors funded by bodies with open access mandates should decide the route at submission, check their institution's SAGE agreement coverage, and follow the deposit guidance for accepted manuscripts. Acceptance rates and median review times are not published in the SAGE instructions reviewed for this profile, and none is invented here; the editor's published emphasis on timely reviews is the commitment on record.

Metrics, Indexing and Standing

Bibliographic trackers record the journal's Scopus h-index in the seventies: the companion Journals World record gives 76, while a 2026 research profile cites a SCImago h-index of 72 with an SJR of 0.792 and an impact factor of 1.8. The small spread between sources reflects different counting dates and databases, not disagreement about the journal's standing: it is a well-cited, mid-tier gerontology journal with five decades of citable archive. Older Journal Citation Reports data quoted in reference works gave a 2017 impact factor of 0.881 with category rankings in Gerontology and in Psychology, Developmental; current values should be verified in the live Journal Citation Reports and Scopus at the time any evaluation depends on them.

Read the metrics in field context. Gerontology's social-science wing cites more slowly than biomedical fields, longitudinal datasets produce papers whose citations accumulate over many years, and an eight-issue journal publishing around seventy papers a year spreads its citations across a large annual base. A impact factor near the middle of the gerontology distribution, combined with an h-index in the seventies, describes a durable specialist journal whose best papers, like the posture-control and Normative Aging Study articles, accumulate hundreds of citations over long careers. Authors should judge fit by whether the journal's readers are the community they need to reach.

The Journals World record notes coverage spanning 1973 to 2026 and a second-quartile standing in its structured data, while other compilations place recent performance in the third quartile in some categories. Quartile labels vary by category and year for this journal, which is exactly why this profile reports the underlying picture, sustained indexing, a large archive and steady citations, rather than pinning the journal to a single quartile letter. Verify the category-specific quartile in Scopus or SCImago for the year relevant to your institution's rules.

Author Guidance: Increasing the Chance of a Positive Decision

Start with theory. The single most repeated editorial preference is for contributions of general theoretical significance, so frame the study around the developmental theory it tests, extends or complicates, whether that is socioemotional selectivity, life-course theory, stress-and-coping models or a measurement theory of aging constructs. State the theoretical claim in the abstract as well as the introduction; editors screening eight issues a year decide quickly, and a theoretically silent abstract undersells a theoretically serious paper.

Choose keywords and reviewers as the editor advises. Keywords should use the field's standard developmental vocabulary so the paper is found by the right reviewers and readers. When suggesting reviewers, propose genuinely unbiased experts, not collaborators, mentors or same-institution colleagues; the editorial office checks, and a compromised suggestion list damages credibility. If the system allows opposed-reviewer requests, use them sparingly and only for documented conflicts.

Write methods for an interdisciplinary reader. A psychologist, a sociologist and an economist may all read your paper in this journal. Define constructs operationally, justify measures for older or midlife samples specifically, report reliability in your sample rather than only citing prior studies, and explain analytic choices in plain language before giving technical detail. For qualitative submissions, show the phenomenological or thematic procedure step by step, with sampling logic and reflexivity, following the standard set by recent published qualitative papers in the journal.

Finally, use the journal's international character. With close to half of publications from outside the United States, non-US authors are a core constituency, not an exception. SAGE points authors needing language help to SAGE Language Services; using professional editing before submission, and saying so in the cover letter, removes a common friction point for international submissions without affecting scientific judgement of the work itself.

The Duplicate Record, and How to Cite This Journal

Journals World carries two records for this journal: this full-title record, The International Journal of Aging and Human Development (post 349904), and a shorter-title record, International Journal of Aging and Human Development (post 12962). Both list the identical ISSN pair, print 0091-4150 and electronic 1541-3535, the same SAGE publication, and overlapping coverage. They are one journal. Librarians, evaluators and authors should consolidate citations under the full title and the standard abbreviation Int J Aging Hum Dev, and should not count the two listings as separate publication venues.

For citation purposes the journal's own volume numbering is continuous from the current title: Volume 103 appeared in 2026, consistent with annual volumes since the 1970s allowing for the journal's historical volume calendar. When citing pre-1973 material, cite the original title Aging and Human Development as printed on the article. When citing current material, give the full current title, because at least two other journals use confusingly similar names in the aging field and precision protects your reference list from misattribution.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was the journal founded and when did it get its current name?

It was established in 1970 as Aging and Human Development and obtained its current name, The International Journal of Aging and Human Development, in 1973.

How many issues does it publish each year?

Eight issues a year, carrying over a thousand pages of scientific content annually, according to the editor's published account.

What kinds of papers are preferred?

Methodologically sound empirical studies that advance theoretical and applied knowledge of human development and aging, with interdisciplinary perspectives strongly encouraged. Reviews are considered when they have a strong scientific focus, and special issue proposals are invited.

How do I submit?

In APA style through the journal's ManuscriptCentral site, following the SAGE instructions to authors for the journal.

Is open access possible?

Yes, optionally through the SAGE Choice programme. The default subscription route remains in place, and SAGE's Journal Author Gateway gives funder-compliance and deposit guidance.

Who is the editor-in-chief?

Julie Hicks Patrick of West Virginia University is the editor-in-chief named in the journal's recent scholarly record, including her 2023 Innovation in Aging presentation. Confirm the current listing on the SAGE journal site before submitting, as appointments change.