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This issue marks yet another transition in the life course of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence: its 40th volume. The Journal's 40-year history also happens to mark the birth and growth of the modern empirical study of adolescence (for a brief review of the journal's history, see Levesque 2007a). The journal, under the leadership of its founding editor, Daniel Offer, played an important role in shepherding the field from its infancy to what it is today (see Levesque 2007b, 2008). As with the study of adolescence itself, the journal has grown tremendously over the past few years. Indeed, it seems to have hit a growth spurt over the past five, when the journal went from 6 issues per year to 12 and experienced a parallel leap in the number of articles per issue.
Given the above developments, it is not surprising to find that the journal remains the most cited to journal broadly devoted to the study of adolescence. According to 2009 Journal Citation Reports, for example, these were the total citations to journals publishing broadly in this area: Journal of Youth of Adolescence, 2,602 citations; Journal of Adolescence, 2,271 citations, Adolescence, 1,611 citations; Journal of Adolescent Research, 1,361 citations; Journal of Research on Adolescence, 1,253 citations; Journal of Early Adolescence, 1,062 citations; and Youth and Society, 678 citations. Alternatively, and given that some journals do not have as long a history, the breadth of citations can be assessed in terms of cited to articles from recent years (here 2007 and 2008) in a given year (here 2009); and doing so does not change much the relative citations to journals: Journal of Youth of Adolescence, 249 citations; Journal of Adolescence, 218 citations, Adolescence, 83 citations; Journal of Adolescent Research, 80 citations; Journal of Research on Adolescence, 111 citations; Journal of Early Adolescence, 57 citations; and Youth and Society, 48 citations. The journal remains the most highly cited to...