October 2003, Vol. 9, No. 3

Reference Work
New Population Encyclopedia Offers Thorough Review,
Reflects Expanded Scope of Field

The newly published Encyclopedia of Population provides a comprehensive appraisal of the field of population studies. The reference work was badly needed, as the last encyclopedia of population was published more than two decades ago in 1982. “In the 1980s, population issues seemed to many people to connote little else but rapid population growth and measures to curtail it,” write the editors, Paul Demeny and Geoffrey McNicoll, in their preface. “Today, population growth is one concern among many.” Both editors have long associations with the Population Council. Demeny, who holds the position of Distinguished Scholar, is founder and editor of the Council’s journal Population and Development Review. McNicoll is a senior associate at the Council. Both have written extensively on population and development issues. 

The Encyclopedia of Population is directed both 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. “An effort is made to avoid material and jargon that would require specialized knowledge,” write the editors, “but without losing significant detail through undue simplification.” The two-volume set includes 336 short articles written by 278 authors. The contributors are experts from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds: anthropology, biology, demography, economics, geography, history, law, literature, philosophy, political science, public health, and sociology. More than one-third of them are from outside the United States. 

Expanding the boundaries 
Along with the standard demographic entries and biographies of persons notable in the field, topics covered in the encyclopedia help to delineate a broadened scope of population studies. Among these are: aging of population, AIDS, animal ecology, childlessness, climate change and population, emerging infectious diseases, environmental ethics, feminist perspectives on population issues, human extinction, and population in literature. “If [this encyclopedia] has an ambition beyond the utilitarian it is to push out the boundaries of the subject.”

Practical information 
The editors have not neglected the core of the field, demography. Subjects related to this, too, are treated in a reader-friendly fashion. In her article on population dynamics, for example, Heather Booth of the Australian National University, Canberra, provides a basic introduction to the topic. She describes population growth and decline, population age structure, and population momentum and aging, avoiding complicated mathematics. 

Other demographic topics that are each explored in several articles are: applied demography, demographic techniques, economic demography, fertility, historical demography, mortality and health, political demography, population statistics and data collection, prehistoric demography, reproduction and birth control, and urban demography.

Controversial issues 
The editors also plumb controversial issues. The ethical concerns raised by genetic testing and new reproductive technologies are discussed, for example. The debate over animal rights is described, as are questions of environmental ethics and euthanasia. "Not a few topics in population studies are contentious, either in terms of research findings or, more basically, in terms of their political and ethical premises or implications," write the editors. "Unsurprisingly, the various authors writing on matters related to such topics may often take differing positions. We have not sought to suppress those differences, but rather to ensure a rough overall degree of balance among the articles.

"A test of such a work," conclude Demeny and McNicoll, "is the extent to which it repays browsing and offers the reader serendipitous discoveries and insights."   The encyclopedia is available from Macmillan Reference USA. A word-searchable electronic version is planned, to be accessible through Gale eBooks and netLibrary. 

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

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See Also

• "The agenda of population studies: A commentary and complaint," Policy Research Division Working Paper no. 42