NEW YORK (4 June 2003) — The Encyclopedia of Population is the first comprehensive appraisal of the field of population studies for many decades. Edited by the Population Council's Paul Demeny and Geoffrey McNicoll, the encyclopedia is a testament to the vitality of the population sciences. 

Population issues have often been defined narrowly, with an emphasis on rapid population growth and measures to curtail it. While the encyclopedia gives full coverage to such matters, the editors have sought a much broader compass. Areas the encyclopedia covers include the entrenchment of very low fertility and problems of old-age support; the retreat from marriage and the diversification of family forms; new medical technologies affecting reproduction and longevity; new or resurgent infectious diseases; South to North migration and refugee movements; the press for women's equality and fuller reproductive rights; population-related environmental change; the evolutionary bases of demographic behavior; and new findings in population history and prehistory. Important ethical debates related to population are also treated-issues both longstanding, like eugenics and asylum-seeking, and newfound, like genetic engineering and animal rights. 

Both editors have had long associations with the Population Council. Paul Demeny, who has the position of Distinguished Scholar, is founder and editor of the Council journal Population and Development Review. He is a past president of the Population Association of America and the 2003 Laureate of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. Geoffrey McNicoll is a senior associate at the Population Council and was formerly professor of demography at the Australian National University, Canberra. Both have written widely on population and development issues. The nearly 300 contributors to the encyclopedia are from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds in the social, biological, and environmental sciences; more than one-third of them are from outside the United States. 

The Encyclopedia of Population is directed to professionals in the population sciences reading outside their immediate areas of expertise and to other social scientists, college students, advanced high school students, and the educated lay reader. It aspires to more than a reference function. "A test of such a work," write editors Demeny and McNicoll, "is the extent to which it repays browsing and offers the reader serendipitous discoveries and insights."

Demeny, Paul and Geoffrey McNicoll (eds.). 2003. Encyclopedia of Population. New York: Macmillan Reference USA.