Original title: The Stratified Geography of Authorship: A U‐Shaped Relationship Between Journal Influence Tier and Author‐Country Concentration in Sociology
Fan Zhang, Lili Wang, Xianwen Wang, Guangyao Zhang · September 2026
Scientific knowledge production has a problem with global inequality. Research often comes from only a few nations. To understand this, researchers examined sociology journals published from 1997 to 2022. They tracked where authors lived and compared that to journal influence tiers, which reflect how often other researchers cite a journal's articles. The authors separated differences between separate journals from trends within the same journal over time. They found that author-country concentrationHow much the authors in a journal come from a small number of countries rather than being spread widely. forms a U-shaped curve. Journals with the lowest influence and journals with the highest influence both draw authors from just a few countries. Journals in the middle rank feature authors from a wider mix of nations. A single, simple trend cannot describe this geographic pattern of publishing.
Imagine a street of restaurants. The cheapest diner and the fanciest steakhouse both tend to serve mostly the same neighborhood regulars, while the mid-priced places pull in a wider mix of customers from across the city. You might expect the fanciest places to draw customers from everywhere, but they don't. In this paper, the restaurants are sociology journals, the customer base is the set of countries the authors come from, and the price tier is the journal's influence level. The same U-shape appears: the least and most influential journals both have a narrow set of author countries, while the middle ones are more internationally diverse.
Science is supposed to be a global conversation, but authorship tells a different story. This study finds that the most and least influential sociology journals both draw authors from a narrow set of countries, while mid-tier journals are the most internationally diverse. That complicates simple narratives about elite science being global and peripheral science being local, and it matters for anyone who studies who gets to produce knowledge.
The study is limited to sociology journals, so the pattern may not hold in other fields. It uses Journal Impact Factor as the only measure of journal influence, and author-country concentration as the only measure of geographic inequality. The analysis identifies associations, not causes, so it does not explain why the U-shape exists. It also does not examine which specific countries are over- or under-represented.
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The Stratified Geography of Authorship: A U‐Shaped Relationship Between Journal Influence Tier and Author‐Country Concentration in Sociology — Fan Zhang, Lili Wang, Xianwen Wang et al. — Learned Publishing — doi:10.1002/leap.2104
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.