The 2005 International Psychogeriatric Association (IPA) research awards in psychogeriatrics.

It gives me enormous pleasure to introduce the three papers which have won prizes for being placed first, second and third in the 2007 International Psychogeriatric Association (IPA) Research Awards in Psychogeriatrics. As was the case in 2005, eligible entrant first authors were required to be junior investigators within five years of the award of their terminal degree who were employed at a level no higher than Assistant Professor/Instructor at the time of entry submission. An unprecedented 38 entries were received from 20 countries (five from the U.S.A., four from India, three from each of Australia, Israel and the U.K., two from each of Belgium, France, Hong Kong PRC, South Korea and Sweden, and one from each of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Turkey). The judges were David Ames (editor-in-chief International Psychogeriatrics, University of Melbourne, Australia), John O’Brien (deputy editor International Psychogeriatrics and member of the IPA Board of Directors (BOD), Institute for Ageing and Health, Newcastle University, U.K.), Joel Sadavoy (IPA President, University of Toronto, Canada), Masatoshi Takeda (13th IPA Congress Chair and IPA Secretary, Osaka University Medical School, Japan), and Bengt Winblad (12th IPA Congress chair and member of the IPA BOD, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden), who chaired the five-person research awards committee. In the initial judging process the 38 entries were whittled down to six finalists and then the five judges voted for the three winners from among those six papers. There was a clear consensus as to both the identity of the three winning papers and the order of the three prize awards. Our winners came from the U.S.A., Singapore and Sweden, while the three runners up were submitted by authors from Australia, Sri Lanka and France. Alert readers will note that Professor Winblad was a co-author on one prize-winning paper, but this potential conflict of interest was dealt with by him not voting on that paper, and indeed the winning papers and their order were noted to be identical regardless of whether Professor Winblad’s votes on the other contestants were included or excluded from the overall totals. As has been reported in relation to previous IPA research awards (Ames, 2006a), recent research award winning papers (Aalten et al., 2006; Aben et al., 2006; Ma et al., 2006) continue to be downloaded very frequently from the journal’s website (www.jounals.cambridge.org/jid_IPG) and to figure prominently among the most cited papers contributing to the journal’s annual