Publishing as Social Closure: Academic Stratification and the Precarity of Early-Career Researchers in China’s Social Sciences

• In Event: Student Forum Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 2: Higher Education

Abstract

China's rapid expansion of doctoral education, coupled with intensified institutional stratification under the "Double First-Class" policy, has produced a paradox: aggregate academic output remains stable, yet early-career researchers (ECRs) in the Humanities and Social Sciences face deepening professional precarity. This study investigates the structural mechanisms underlying this paradox by examining how top-tier journals indexed in the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI) function as exclusive club goods that enforce social closure. Drawing on bibliometric data of approximately 216,489 articles and 142,166 authors across Economics, Sociology, and Education (2010–2024), we employ Logit model and survival analysis to trace the evolving barriers to academic publishing. Our findings reveal a threefold closure mechanism: (1) journals neutralize expanded page capacity through article-length inflation, raising the effective cost of entry; (2) institutional signaling and strategic co-authorship with elite-affiliated scholars increasingly substitute for meritocratic peer review, with non-elite authors' publication odds rising significantly only through elite co-authorship; and (3) approximately 66.5% of debut authors fail to publish a second CSSCI article within three years, with survival rates strongly stratified by institutional origin. These results expose a compounding Matthew Effect that systematically marginalizes non-elite ECRs, raising critical insights about the sustainability of academic talent reproduction in China.

Author

• Songxuan Luo, East China Normal University