Symbolic Capital and Inequality in Scholarly Communication: A Bibliometric Study of Editorial Boards

Editorial boards function as gatekeepers in academic publishing, yet systematic frameworks for quantifying how symbolic capital concentrates within editorial networks remain absent. This study operationalizes Bourdieu’s symbolic capital theory through network analysis of 2,135 editorial positions across 30 sustainability science journals. Eigenvector centrality measures symbolic capital as prestige derived from connections to other prestigious positions, while Gini coefficients assess distributional inequality. Among 71 interlocking editors (those holding multiple board positions), women comprise only 22.5%, and scholars from Western Europe and North America dominate both numerically and structurally: editors with the highest eigenvector centrality are concentrated almost exclusively in these regions, while Latin America and Africa contribute only two interlocking editors each. A two-dimensional typology combining median eigenvector centrality with Gini coefficients distinguishes four configurations of symbolic capital across journals: concentrated core, dispersed core, concentrated periphery, and dispersed periphery. Critically, journals’ positions in editorial interlock networks align only partially with their citation-based intellectual centrality, demonstrating that governance structures and knowledge networks represent distinct dimensions of academic power. This reproducible analytical framework enables systematic comparison of editorial governance structures across fields.