Due to similar publishing models, comprehensive journals of humanities and social sciences have long been trapped in the dilemma of same characteristics and low-level repetition. The above-mentioned difficulties can to some extent be attributed to the lack of topic planning, which leads to the lack of distinctive characteristics in publishing. The solution lies in vigorously strengthening topic planning and taking the path of characteristic development. Therefore, topic planning has become a common choice for humanities and social science comprehensive journals to improve the quality of publication and solve the problem of low-level repetition. Taking comprehensive journals of humanities from universities that have been selected as CSSCI source journals over the years as samples, panel data from 2008 to 2021 are constructed to measure the quantitative and qualitative influence of the journals based on the average citation frequency per article and the number of reprints of China Social Science Excellence. The effect of topic planning on the influence of comprehensive journals of humanities and social sciences is empirically tested. The results indicate that topic planning has a significant impact on both quantitative and qualitative influence of journals. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the role of topic planning is to enhance the academic influence of non 985 university journals, but the expected effect on 985 university journals has not been achieved; The stronger the humanities and social sciences discipline strength of the journal sponsor, the weaker the role of topic planning in enhancing the journal’s influence; The higher the proportion of internal articles, the weaker the effect of topic planning on enhancing the influence of journals, but this conclusion is not applicable to 985 university journals. Further analysis reveals that the internal structure of topic planning also affects its effectiveness. Firstly, both themed and non themed promotional topics can enhance the influence of a journal. Compared to the latter, the former brings more citations to the journal, but its effect on improving reprints is not significant. Secondly, social science topics have significantly increased the influence of journals, while humanities topics have not achieved the expected results. The sub sample test finds that selecting humanities topics significantly reduces the reprints of journals from 985 universities, but it could enhance the short-term quantitative influence of journals from other universities. Thirdly, the impact of single disciplinary topic selection on journal influence is significantly better than that of interdisciplinary topic selection, and the positive effects of interdisciplinary topic selection can only be reflected in qualitative and long-term quantitative evaluations. The sub sample test finds that the journals of 211 universities have planned more interdisciplinary topics that combine with the new technological revolution and social science hot topics, significantly increasing their short-term and long-term citation and reposting volume, and even having a better effect on reposting volume than single disciplinary topics. These findings have enlightening implications for optimizing topic selection strategies for humanities and social sciences comprehensive journals.