Abstract

Global aging has proceeded at an unprecedented and accelerating rate. The aging of the population creates both opportunities and challenges for elders, their families, and society in navigating the availability, funding, delivery, and quality of long-term services and supports. Importantly, there is substantial variation in the effects of and response to global aging both within and across nations depending, in part, on prevailing cultural expectations and values, political and economic imperatives, and social and demographic characteristics. Multi-morbidity is, for example, rapidly rising up the policy agenda in many places. Thus, while some regions and countries have responded with innovative long-term care policies and programs to better enable care of the growing cohort of older adults, other regions and countries have struggled with their response or barely begun to plan for the rising population of elders. Inequalities within and across populations is also an increasingly important concern.

This symposium assembles editors at three leading journals to discuss the role that peer-reviewed publications can play in disseminating knowledge that informs long-term care research, policy, and practice internationally. The editors are: Edward Alan Miller, PhD, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Aging & Social Policy; Michael Clark, PhD, Managing Editor, Journal of Long-Term Care, and Howard Degenholtz, PhD, Associate Editor for Long-Term Services and Supports, Innovation in Aging. Each editor will review the scope, content, and focus of their journal and opportunities and challenges for global scholarship in long-term care. Michael Gusmano, PhD, a leading expert on the economic, political, and social consequences of global aging and International Editor of the Journal of Aging & Social Policy, will each serve as a discussant. So too will Pamela Nadash, PhD, a leading scholar on long-term services and supports internationally.

This session has three major goals: (1) to compare and contrast trends in international research content and submission across three journals, (2) to identify the benefits and challenges to broader international dissemination of peer-reviewed scholarship in long-term care; and (3) to draw on and apply the advice of the journal editors and discussants for the purposes of submitting to and publishing in peer-reviewed outlets in long-term care and achieving wider impact.

Presentation 1: Global long-term care scholarship in the Journal of Aging & Social Policy

Edward Miller, University of Massachusetts Boston

Elizabeth Simpson, University of Massachusetts Boston
Michael Gusmano, Lehigh University
Pamela Nadesh, University of Massachusetts Boston

Policymakers, practitioners, and researchers need a balanced, thoughtful, and analytical resource to meet the challenge of global aging at a rate that’s historically unprecedented. The Journal of Aging & Social Policy (JASP) (https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/wasp20/current), which was founded in 1989, serves this role by drawing contributions from an international panel of policy analysts and scholars who assume an interdisciplinary perspective in examining and analyzing critical phenomena that affect aging and the development and implementation of programs for elders from a global perspective. Study settings extend beyond the United States to include Europe, the Middle East, Australia, Latin America, Asia, and the Asia-Pacific rim.

This presentation will document the scope, content, and focus of JASP, including the rise of international submissions, which now account for approximately half of articles published. Opportunities for publishing on long-term care in JASP will be discussed; so too will strategies for navigating the peer-review process successfully.

Presentation 2: Global long-term care scholarship in the Journal of Long-Term Care

Michael Clark, London School of Economics and Political Science

The Journal of Long-Term Care (JLTC) was first published in 2018 and has been supported by the School for Social Care Research of the National Institute for Health Research in England (https://www.sscr.nihr.ac.uk/) and hosted by the International Long-Term Care Policy Network (https://www.ilpnetwork.org/journal/) to provide a focus for high-quality evidence about long-term care. As the challenge of providing outstanding long-term care to match the changing demographics of populations continues to rise on local and national policy agendas, many policy makers and practitioners increasingly see the gaps in the evidence they need and the dispersed nature of the evidence that does exist. This presentation will discuss this context and the rationale behind the JLTC, as well as the scope of the journal and its goal of addressing the challenges discussed. We will consider the lessons from the last 4 years of the journal in terms of publishing high quality research in long-term care.

Presentation 3: Global long-term care scholarship in Innovation in Aging

Howard Dengenholtz, University of Pittsburgh

Innovations in Aging (IA) is an open access journal published by The Gerontological Society of America (https://academic.oup.com/innovateage). IA was launched in 2017 and has published over 190 articles. The mission of the journal is to publish conceptually sound, methodologically rigorous research studies that describe innovative theories, research methods, interventions, evaluations, and policies relevant to aging and the life course. Every article is accompanied by a statement of Translational Significance. This brief statement helps readers identify important findings that can be used by policy makers, practitioners, and other researchers to improve individual, organizational, societal, or environmental conditions associated with aging and the life course. This presentation will discuss the publication process, provide examples of recent papers on long-term services and supports, and share opportunities for junior and senior scholars to be involved in the peer review process.

Slides