The Gerontologist 43:758-760 (2003)
© 2003 The Gerontological Society of America
Disciplinary Perspectives on Later-Life Migration in the Core Journals of Social Gerontology
William H. Walters, PhD1, and
Esther I. Wilder, PhD2,3
Correspondence: Address correspondence to William H. Walters, Owen D. Young Library, St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY 13617. E-mail: whwalters{at}stlawu.edu
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Abstract
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Purpose:The authors examine the bibliographic structure of recent research on later-life migration, highlighting the contributions of particular journals and disciplines.Design and Methods:The authors identify the primary journals publishing research in this area, including a set of four core journals within the field of social gerontology. They evaluate the disciplinary affiliations of authors publishing in the core journals and the extent to which those journals cite relevant research published elsewhere.Results:Geographical and economic perspectives on later-life migration are underrepresented within the core journals of social gerontology. In particular, major articles published outside the core journals are seldom cited within those journals.Implications:Although the core journals of social gerontology account for over a third of the recent literature on later-life migration, they present only a partial (chiefly sociological) perspective on the subject.
Although later-life migration is of special interest to many gerontologists, relatively little of the research on this topic has been specifically gerontological in focus. Much of the relevant literature has appeared in the journals of other disciplines, and some of the most important work has been written by authors with primary affiliations in sociology, geography, or demography rather than gerontology. Nonetheless, recent publication and citation patterns suggest that economic and geographical perspectives on later-life migration have been underrepresented in the core journals of social gerontology.
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Methods
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We first tried to identify all articles published between 1990 and 2000 on later-life migration in the United States and Canada—studies of elderly migration, retirement migration, relocation to nursing homes, etc. We searched AgeLine, EconLit, GEOBASE, MEDLINE, PAIS, Periodical Abstracts, POPLINE, Social Sciences Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Sociological Abstracts; consulted the Journal of Planning Literature; and browsed through issues of Research on Aging, the Journals of Gerontology, and The Gerontologist. Additional items were found in the bibliographies of articles already selected for inclusion in the study. These efforts produced a set of over 500 potentially relevant articles published between January 1990 and December 2000. After reading and evaluating each article, we eliminated those that failed to meet a set of six evaluative criteria: relevance of subject matter, importance of findings, innovativeness of methods or approach, number of studies previously published on the topic, accessibility of content, and accessibility of the published article itself. Our goal was to include every journal article that made a substantial contribution to the literature. One hundred fifty-five items met all six criteria. With just a few exceptions, the articles included in our analysis correspond to those described by Walters (2002) in a recent literature review. That review also discusses the evaluative criteria in greater detail.
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Results
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Table 1 identifies the journals that published the most articles on later-life migration during the 1990s. Three gerontology journals appear in the top five, as do Rural Sociology and the Journal of Regional Science. The Gerontologist, Growth and Change, and 5 geography journals round out the top 12. Surprisingly, the core journals of sociology, economics, and demography are not major outlets for articles on later-life migration. Research by sociologists is well-represented in the social gerontology journals, however. Sociologists contributed over two-thirds of the later-life migration articles published in the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences and The Gerontologist, for example (Table 2). In contrast, geographers and economists placed significantly fewer articles in the core journals of social gerontology. (For our purposes, the core journals are defined as the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, Research on Aging, the Journal of Applied Gerontology, and The Gerontologist. Taken together, all the other gerontology journals—Ageing and Society, Journal of Aging and Health, etc.—contributed only seven articles that met the criteria for inclusion in our study.)
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Table 2. Disciplinary Affiliations of Authors Publishing on Later-Life Migration in the Core Journals of Social Gerontology (Percentage From Each Discipline, by Journal).
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Additional evidence shows that the core journals of social gerontology are unlikely to cite articles published in the other major outlets for research on later-life migration. Looking first at the four core journals, we can see that they cite each other fairly often (Table 3). Sixty percent of the later-life migration papers that appeared in these journals from 1990 to 2000 were subsequently cited at least once within the same set of four journals. (This 60% citation rate is especially impressive when we consider that articles published later in the decade had only a few months or years in which they could have been cited.) Remarkably, however, a typical article published in one of the other top journals (the nongerontology journals shown in Table 1) had only an 11% chance of being cited in any of the four core journals from 1990 to 2000. On average, items published in the four core journals were cited by 1.9 articles, whereas those published in the other top journals were cited by just 0.2 articles. (Of course, these data refer only to citations within later-life migration articles appearing in the core gerontology journals.)
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Table 3. Percentage of Articles Cited Within Later-Life Migration Studies Published in the Core Journals of Social Gerontology.
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Scholars relying solely on bibliographies found in the Journal of Gerontology, Research on Aging, the Journal of Applied Gerontology, and The Gerontologist will encounter citations to only a fraction of the later-life migration studies published in the journals of other disciplines. In particular, they will find no references to some of the most important theoretical work of the past decade: Evans' (1990) assessment of spatial equilibrium and migration, Halfacree and Boyle's (1993) article advocating a biographical approach to migration research, and Plane and Rogerson's (Plane and Rogerson, 1991; Plane, 1992) work on labor force entry pressure—the idea that the size of a birth cohort influences its rate of retirement migration. Together, these four articles have been cited at least 114 times, but not once within the set of later-life migration studies appearing in the core journals of social gerontology.
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Discussion
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The 12 journals shown in Table 1 published 63% of the articles included in our analysis. In fact, the core journals of social gerontology account for over a third of the literature on later-life migration. No journal outside the top 12 published more than three articles in this area, and more than half the journals that published in this area contributed only a single paper. The advantage of this situation is that researchers are likely to encounter a significant proportion of the relevant literature simply by reading the journals shown in Table 1. A corresponding disadvantage, however, is that the remaining articles are scattered across a wide range of publications in fields as diverse as finance, planning, public health, regional development, social work, and statistics. Researchers who read only the top journals will miss important work published elsewhere.
A second disadvantage is the potential neglect of disciplinary perspectives not well-represented in the major social gerontology journals. This applies especially to economics and, to a lesser extent, geography. Economists are not frequent contributors to Research on Aging, for example, and economic approaches to migration theory are seldom mentioned in The Gerontologist. From one perspective, social gerontologists should pay greater attention to research published outside the core journals of their field. At the same time, others working in this area should be aware of the journals most likely to reach a large, multidisciplinary audience.
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Footnotes
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We are grateful for the comments of two anonymous reviewers. 
1 Owen D. Young Library, St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY.
2 Department of Sociology and Social Work, Lehman College, The City University of New York, Bronx, NY.
3 Department of Sociology, The City University of New York Graduate Center, New York, NY.
Decision Editor: Linda S. Noelker, PhD
Received for publication August 6, 2002.
Accepted for publication January 14, 2003.
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References
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- Evans, A. W., 1990;. The assumption of spatial equilibrium in the analysis of migration and interregional differences: A review of some recent research. Journal of Regional Science,. 30:515-531.[Medline]
- Halfacree, K. H., Boyle, P. J., 1993;. The challenge facing migration research: The case for a biographical approach. Progress in Human Geography,. 17:333-348.[Free Full Text]
- Plane, D. A., 1992;. Age-composition change and the geographical dynamics of interregional migration in the U.S. Annals of the Association of American Geographers,. 82:64-85.
- Plane, D. A., Rogerson, P. A., 1991;. Tracking the baby boom, the baby bust, and the echo generations: How age composition regulates U.S. migration. Professional Geographer,. 43:416-430.
- Walters, W. H., 2002;. Later-life migration in the United States: A review of recent research. Journal of Planning Literature,. 17:37-66.[Abstract/Free Full Text]
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