摘要:The Sociologija sela - Rural Sociology quarteriy has been published for forty years without interruption. This is the occasion for its role in the reflection of fundamental social changes in Croatia's village and agriculture and in the rural sociology development to be discussed and affirmed. Through this editorial and the 17 research papers by the authors who have been making the magazine or have continuously collaborated in it, which were published in Rural Sociology and which have had the greatest repercussion within the scientific community, the overview work on the magazine's contribution to bibliographic studies, and the bibliography of all the articles (1551) that were published in 158 numbers of Rural Sociology - being the best proof of to what issues has the magazine paid attention, who were its collaborators and what is its contribution, this anniversary issue is to contribute to this cause. In this overview article the three editors, two former and the present one - starting from the fact that every magazine is the basic image, the crystallised achievements of a particular discipline - give the summarized account of the basic changes and developmental phases the Croatia's village and individual agriculture have been through during the last four decades as well as the main tendencies in the rural sociology development and the magazine's role in it, which can be reconstructed through the articles that were published in Rural Sociology. First, in that period the village underwent and survived the decay of agrarian society (in the 1950s and 1960s), then it has established a new balance within its ever manyfolded and ever stronger connections with the city (in the 1970s and 1980s), so that (at the end of 1980s and in the beginning of the 19905) a new dynamics emerged in Croatia's village - modem family agrarian smallholds appear, the new forms of enterpreneurship and the new ways of using the rural areas, and even that (at the end of the 20th century) it suffered the war, which was particulariy cruel towards the village and the rural population, after which it was exposed to the difficulties of transition that strongly aggravates its renewal. Second, the Rural Sociology has had crucial role in the constituting and the development of rural sociology in Croatian and other federal units of former Yugoslavia.