Population and Development Review

• 1. Introduction

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  Population and Development Review has spent nearly five decades asking one of the most consequential questions in social science: how does the size and shape of a human population drive the fate of societies? Established in 1975, this quarterly academic journal was built around the idea that population cannot be studied in isolation. Poverty, environmental change, political upheaval, public health crises - all of these fold back onto how many people there are, where they live, and how they move through the world. The journal is published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Population Council, an organization long dedicated to understanding the human condition through a demographic lens. Across its lifespan, it has been shaped by a small number of editors who each left a distinct mark on what the journal chose to care about. Paul Demeny guided it for nearly four decades; today, co-editors Raya Muttarak and Joshua Wilde carry the work forward. What is it about population research that commands a top ranking in its field, and how did a journal founded during the mid-1970s become the most-cited outlet in demography?

• 2. Scope and Form

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  The journal does not limit itself to counting births and deaths. Population and Development Review covers population studies alongside the relationships between population change and economic, environmental, and social forces - as well as thinking about what all of this means for public policy. That breadth is built into the content types the journal accepts. Original research articles sit alongside commentaries, data and perspectives on statistics, archival documents on population issues, and book reviews. The journal also publishes official documents from population agencies or related organizations, giving it a reach into policy circles that purely academic outlets rarely claim. This combination means that a single issue might include a peer-reviewed study on fertility decline, a statistical note on migration data, and a document from an international population body - all speaking to different audiences at once. That deliberate mix has made the journal a crossroads for researchers, policymakers, and demographers who otherwise rarely read the same pages.

• 3. Guardians of the Record

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  Paul Demeny edited Population and Development Review from the journal's founding in 1975 through 2012 - a tenure of nearly four decades that is extraordinary by any measure in academic publishing. Geoffrey McNicoll joined him as co-editor for the final stretch, from 2008 through 2012. Together they handed the journal to Landis MacKellar, who edited it from 2013 to 2021, again sharing duties with McNicoll through 2017. The current co-editors are Raya Muttarak and Joshua Wilde, who now set the journal's direction. What is notable across this editorial history is the continuity: a small number of people held stewardship over the journal for long periods, giving it a coherent intellectual identity over decades. Each transition brought a new co-editor into the fold before the outgoing one departed, ensuring no clean break between editorial eras. That pattern of overlapping leadership has helped the journal maintain consistency in its standards across what is now a fifty-year run.

• 4. Standing in the Field

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  According to the Journal Citation Reports, Population and Development Review holds a 2023 impact factor of 4.6. That number places it first out of 49 journals in the category of Demography and 7th out of 217 journals in Sociology. Finishing first in Demography means every peer outlet in that specialty is ranked below it. The 7th-place finish in a field as broad as Sociology - 217 journals wide - signals that the journal's reach extends well beyond the specialty audience it was built to serve. Impact factors measure how often a journal's articles are cited by other researchers; a high score in two distinct categories suggests that demographers, sociologists, and policy scholars alike treat Population and Development Review as a primary reference. For a quarterly journal covering a field that many people outside academia regard as narrow, those rankings represent a striking degree of influence. The Population Council, on whose behalf Wiley-Blackwell publishes the journal, can point to this record as evidence of what sustained, focused investment in a single publication can produce over time.