From its inception in 1946, Population Studies has taken a broad view of demography, reflecting the outlook of its founding editor, David Glass, and carried forward during its first 50 years by Eugene Grebenik. The aim of its 50th anniversary issue in 1996 was to describe developments in demographic research during its first 50 years of existence. That period witnessed many of the major advances to the techniques of demographic analysis, as well as the increase in availability of new individual-level data sets (e.g. the World Fertility Surveys), some of which were longitudinal in nature.
Population research invariably depends on the nature of the data available and researchers’ abilities to analyse them to shed light on demographic processes and structures at the population level. Since 1996, when John Simons took over as the third editor of Population Studies, the data of interest to demographers have expanded enormously and along with them new statistical techniques to deal with the complexity of the data collection methods. Of particular importance has been the expanding programme of Demographic and Health Surveys, which provide country-specific and comparative data on population, health, and nutrition in over 90 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Studies collecting longitudinal data (e.g. birth cohort studies and household panel data) have matured, and population registration data are increasingly available to researchers, albeit for only a few, mostly Scandinavian, countries. Census and survey data from many countries covering long time periods have become digitally accessible through the IPUMS (not an acronym!) programme. All these types of data have featured in many papers published in Population Studies during the past 25 years.
New vistas in data relevant for demographers are opening, as explained in Ridhi Kashyap's paper in this issue. These new data possibilities present new challenges, however. Many of the new sources are by their nature unrepresentative of the sorts of well-defined populations with which demographic analysts are familiar. This makes further development of statistical techniques for combining data and cross-validating them at the population level an important part of using the new types of data in demography and population studies.
Fortunately, along with new data, population studies has attracted more researchers into its sphere, aided by an expansion of graduate programmes in social sciences and by interest shown by academics in disciplines previously less active in the field. They have brought new analytical insights into population studies, both in the way they think about the subject and in new skills in data analysis, interpretation, and presentation. A consequence of this cross-fertilization is a field endowed with a new generation of scholars with the interests and abilities to develop the field of population studies further. It is impossible to know in what direction they may take it, but its future looks bright.
Looking to the journal rather than the field, the outlook is much less clear than it would have been in 1996. Back then it was reasonable to expect that in 2021 Population Studies would be a journal managed and published in a similar way to the one being run and published in 1996, and that has proved to be broadly the case. At present, academic journal publication in humanities and the social sciences is in a much greater state of flux than it was then. First, there are many more journals covering topics related to population studies, with variable degrees of specialization (e.g. more journals focusing on migration, population economics, and public health, to give a few examples). Second, open access is becoming the standard for academic journals, but it is uncertain what model will be used for funding this type of journal in future. Third, both the increasing number of journals and the move to open access have been accompanied by (if not indeed being partly a cause of) a tendency to reduce editorial input of all types: reviewers are harder to secure, careful copy-editing is virtually absent in many journals (Population Studies being an important exception), and there are many competing demands on the time of editorial board members. The model of how editorial costs are borne and distributed needs to change, and this has implications for the future of Population Studies (as well as journals like it, run by small learned societies and having a small readership). Addressing this challenge is important for our field.
Even at today's much-improved life expectancy at age 75, I will not serve as long as each of the previous editors of the journal, even if the Population Investigation Committee and I were so inclined. Despite inevitable changes in editorial policy, I envisage Population Studies’ eclectic mix of papers aimed at a broad readership in demography and population science continuing beyond my editorship. Hopefully a publishing model can be found to assure that Population Studies thrives to its centenary.