SocArXiv new submissions at record pace

SocArXiv accepted 3,162 new papers in 2025, an increase of 20% over 2024. We don’t have data on total submissions, but as we noted previously, the volume of new submissions has spiked partly from an influx of AI-generated slop. However, the greater volume of accepted papers (we hope) reflects growth in human research as well. Our new policy of accepting only social science papers, in addition to the moratorium on technical AI research, reinforces this perception.

The rejection rate is much higher than it used to be, which means that our moderation burden has increased substantially. This is exacerbated by the (welcome) fact that new versions of papers now go through our moderation queue. Our team of moderation volunteers deserves our appreciation.

Revised papers are a relatively small share of new uploads. In the 30 days to February 16, we had 500 paper uploads of 454 unique papers. We accepted new versions of 99 papers (some more than once). We accepted 9 papers that at greater than third versions. (New versions are potentially a vehicle for spamming our announcement feed, so we try to keep an eye on superfluous revisions.)

The 355 new papers we accepted in the previous 30 days reflect an annual pace of about 4,300 papers, which would be 37% above the 2025 pace.

My Stata code to retrieve metadata for the last 30 days of SocArXiv papers is available here.