75 years of Population Studies: A diamond anniversary special issue.

Abstract

The celebration of anniversaries is a long-standing, widespread, and popular custom, connecting us to the cycle of life and prompting reflections on who we have become. Celebrations are often linked to demographic events or transitions, such as births and weddings or, in the case of royalty, events such as transition to the throne. As 2021 draws to a close, Population Studies: A Journal of Demography completes its 75th year of publication. To mark its golden anniversary in 1996, the editors curated a special issue which brought together a range of reflections about the state of the discipline and the contribution the journal had made in its first 50 years. That issue was as glittery and as weighty as something golden should be (with a specific gravity of 19.3, pure gold is one of the heaviest minerals in the world). Many of the papers in that remarkable collection could be described as classics: they remain highly cited and are frequently downloaded by both researchers and students. The issue came out when we, the guest editors of this special issue, were students ourselves and were just beginning the process of academic and discipline-specific enculturation. By describing the discipline itself— its priorities, sources of data, and ways of knowing —the 1996 special issue provided a polished insider view of the scholarly community that was, at that stage in our lives, not entirely familiar to us. Given how much the world and the discipline— and we ourselves—have changed in the past quarter of a century, we thought the 75th anniversary would be a good time to once again take stock and reflect. With some accounts locating its origins in the German bloc of the Holy Roman Empire, the association of gold with the 50th anniversary and silver with the 25th anniversary is a centuries-old European custom, one which did not appear to make its way to Anglo-Saxon Europe until the nineteenth century. Although the diamond came to be associated with the 60th anniversary when Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee, prior to that, the ‘traditional’ diamond anniversary was the 75th. What unique aspects of the diamond did we hope to bring to this celebration and this issue? One of the key distinctions between gold and diamonds is that gold is homogeneous and diamonds are not. It is perhaps right then that this issue has sought to include a more heterogeneous set of authors and perspectives than was included 25 years ago. At the same time, diamonds usually come with some kind of imperfection. They are often recut to improve them. Our diamond celebration draws attention to what has been and is so very beautiful about the discipline but also considers its imperfections and ways it might be recut to enhance its value. Like diamonds, our discipline is strong and resilient. We are confident it can withstand some scrutiny and critique alongside some well-deserved appreciation. What better way to take stock—and to celebrate the journal’s contribution to knowledge—than to construct a detailed profile of the body of research published over the life of this journal? Melinda Mills and Charles Rahal conduct a fascinating assessment of all 1,901 papers published since its first issue in 1947. While most readers familiar with the journal will have some idea of prominent topics that were covered in it and how the research focus has (or has not) changed over the years, their detailed findings do far more than simply confirm expectations. While we were not surprised to find that fertility has been the topic most often written about in the journal, or that there was more research on mortality than migration, we were a little surprised to learn that for a journal that was slower than other demography journals to present research on issues such as women’s employment and childcare (Caldwell 1996; Presser 1997; Desai 2000), Population Studies has published even fewer papers on migration than on family and marriage. Although migration is one of the three components of population change and a demographic Population Studies, 2021 Vol. 75, No. S1, S1–S5, https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2021.2006440