In 2014, the International Psychogeriatric Association (IPA) celebrated the fact that IPA's flagship scientific journal International Psychogeriatrics (IPG) has matured, attaining 25 years of existence since its foundation in 1989. The IPG editorial team introduced several new features in the 2014 issues to celebrate this significant quarter century milestone. One of them was the new “paper of the month” category. Following an internal selection process amongst the editorial team, who ranked available accepted papers focusing on their scientific quality and clinical relevance each month, one paper was selected as paper of the month from the categories “original research articles” and “reviews”. This resulted in 12 papers of the month, of which eight were original research articles and four were reviews or meta-analyses. Each paper of the month was accompanied by a short commentary highlighting its importance, written either by an editorial team member, one of the reviewers of the paper, or an external international expert on the topic of the paper. The editorial team aimed to highlight various psychogeriatric topics, so there are papers covering the wide spectrum of cognitive impairment, from risk factors such a hippocampal atrophy (Ferrarini et al., Reference Ferrarini2014) and traumatic brain injury (Gilbert et al., Reference Gilbert, Snyder, Corcoran, Norton, Lyketsos and Tschanz2014), via transition between diagnostic categories on the cognitive continuum (Ellis et al., 2014) to variations in symptom expression (Rockwood et al., Reference Rockwood, Fay, Hamilton, Ross and Moorhouse2014) and apathy (Theleritis et al., 2014) to exercise interventions for people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) (Farina et al., 2014) or antipsychotic use for patients with dementia living in residential care (Kleijer et al., Reference Kleijer2014). Other papers reported on topics relevant to the aging process in general, such as neuroplasticity (Valkanova et al., Reference Valkanova, Rodriguez and Ebmeier2014), loneliness (Yan et al., Reference Yan, Yang, Wang, Zhao and Yu2014) or attitudes to aging (Shenkin et al., Reference Shenkin, Laidlaw, Allerhand, Mead, Starr and Deary2014). Other psychogeriatric topics covered were delirium (Ritchie et al., Reference Ritchie, Newman, Leurent and Sampson2014) and geriatric depression (Steffens et al., Reference Steffens, McQuoid and Potter2014). In the international spirit of IPA, authors of the 12 papers come from Australia, Canada China, Greece, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA. From those 12 papers an IPG paper of the year 2014 was selected with the help of three independent reviewers: Dr Doh Kwan Kim from South Korea, Dr Gill Livingston from the UK, and Dr Daniel Weintraub from the USA. Our three reviewers ranked all 12 papers of the month independently from each other and the highest ranked paper overall was “The association of traumatic brain injury with rate of progression of cognitive and functional impairment in a population-based cohort of Alzheimer's disease: the Cache County Dementia Progression Study” by Mac Gilbert, Christine Snyder, Chris Corcoran, Maria C. Norton, Constantine G. Lyketsos, and JoAnn T. Tschanz. The reviewers emphasized that traumatic brain injury (TBI) is recognized as an important risk factor for AD which needs more research, and that the study by Gilbert et al. contributes important new knowledge to the area with the specific strength of reporting long-term follow up. In this context, we refer to the excellent commentary on the paper of the year by Dr David Sharp (Sharp, Reference Sharp2014), which was published alongside the paper of the year when it was paper of the month in the October 2014 issue.
The Editorial Team has decided to continue the paper of the month and the paper of the year categories beyond the birthday year of 2014, as we view them as good initiatives to further develop the journal and as a good opportunity to highlight for the readers of IPG some of the excellent contributions the journal receives. With the help of our publisher, Cambridge University Press, we encouraged the authors of the 12 papers of the month to contribute more information about their studies and were delighted that the majority were happy to provide this via blogs. We thank and congratulate the authors of the 12 papers, the authors of the 12 commentaries and the 3 independent reviewers for helping to establish this new category.
We conclude by congratulating the authors of the paper of the year 2014 and note that in ten years of time they will have a one in ten chance of being selected as the paper of the decade!
Conflict of interest
None.
