purpose: this study intends to evaluate the regional tendencies of research collaboration of social sciences in china, and shows the pattern of china's inter-regional research collaboration (irrc).

design/methodology/approach: by using 10 years' data of 150 economic journals in cnki database, this paper used the salton index as the indicator to measure the collaborative intensity of 31 regions in china.

findings: first, regional tendencies of research collaboration in social sciences do exist in china. second, there is a positive correlation between collaborative tendency and regional scientific productivity. every region would like to cooperate with high productive regions, and high productive regions tend to have collaborations within the region itself. third, geographical proximity is an important factor affecting china's irrc.

research limitations: there are many other important external conditions which may affect research collaboration, but not all of them have been taken into account in this research. practical implications: the proposed method can be also applied to detect cooperation preference of different authors, scientific research institutions and countries. and the study will help us understand the importance of distance in scholarly cooperation.

originality/value: previous researches proved that regional research collaborations exist in natural sciences in china, while this research showed that the same phenomenon also appears in social sciences in china.

purpose: this study intends to evaluate the regional tendencies of research collaboration of social sciences in china, and shows the pattern of china's inter-regional research collaboration (irrc).

design/methodology/approach: by using 10 years' data of 150 economic journals in cnki database, this paper used the salton index as the indicator to measure the collaborative intensity of 31 regions in china.

findings: first, regional tendencies of research collaboration in social sciences do exist in china. second, there is a positive correlation between collaborative tendency and regional scientific productivity. every region would like to cooperate with high productive regions, and high productive regions tend to have collaborations within the region itself. third, geographical proximity is an important factor affecting china's irrc.

research limitations: there are many other important external conditions which may affect research collaboration, but not all of them have been taken into account in this research. practical implications: the proposed method can be also applied to detect cooperation preference of different authors, scientific research institutions and countries. and the study will help us understand the importance of distance in scholarly cooperation.

originality/value: previous researches proved that regional research collaborations exist in natural sciences in china, while this research showed that the same phenomenon also appears in social sciences in china.