With greater volume comes greater prestige? – an analysis of social sciences journals’ publication patterns between 2004 and 2024

This study examines whether expansion in journal publication volume translates into higher prestige within the social sciences, a field where citation cycles are long and hierarchies persistent. Drawing on Derek de Solla Price’s insights into growth, the analysis problematizes the assumption that “more is better” by asking how volumes, citations, and prestige metrics evolved across quartiles (between 2004–2024), whether short-term increases in output yield contemporaneous gains in citations, SJR scores, or quartile mobility, and to what extent historical performance mediates these relationships. Using SCImago data, the study employs descriptive trend analysis, correlation tests, regression models, Markov chains, and clustering to try and answer the above questions in the context of structural and dynamic publication patterns. Results show steep stratification. Q1 journals doubled output and gained over 500% in citations, while Q4 stagnated in volume despite growing in number. Short-term volume increases had minor effects on prestige metrics, with correlations near zero and high quartile inertia, namely, that Q1 journals retained rank 84% of the time, Q4 remained stuck 61%. Historical SJR scores and citations may be referenced to predict future prestige while volume growth offered only modest and often asymmetric benefits which supported upward mobility mainly for lower-tier journals.