The Stratified Geography of Authorship: A U‐Shaped Relationship Between Journal Influence Tier and Author‐Country Concentration in Sociology

ABSTRACT This study contributes to the literature on global inequality in scientific knowledge production by examining how author‐country concentration varies with journals' positions in the academic publishing hierarchy. Using a longitudinal dataset of sociology journals from the Web of Science and Journal Citation Reports covering 1997–2022, we distinguish between differences across journals and changes within the same journal over time. The between‐journal analysis reveals a U‐shaped association between journals' average Journal Impact Factor and average author‐country concentration: concentration is higher among journals at the lower and upper ends of the influence hierarchy than among journals occupying intermediate positions. Two‐way fixed‐effects models provide complementary evidence of a similar nonlinear association between annual changes in Journal Impact Factor and changes in author‐country concentration within journals. Together, these findings indicate that the association between journal influence and the geographic concentration of authorship is not adequately summarized by a single monotonic trend and provide a more differentiated empirical account of inequality in global scientific knowledge production.