Editorial board members play an important role in controlling academic discourse. Analyzing the correlation between the number of editional board members and the scientific output indicators of universities would help in improving the current academic evaluation system. This study used a sample of 984 universities having SSCI editorial board members in economics and the quantile regression method to characterize the correlation between the number of editorial board members and the scientific output indicators of these universities. The results suggest that the number of editorial board members is positively and significantly related to the scientific output (the number of articles, total number of citations, citations per paper and h index, respectively) of these universities; A deeper analysis conducted using quantile regression indicates that the coefficient of the number of editorial board members on the indicators of scientific output (the number of articles, total number of citations and h index) is greater (smaller) when the university is at a higher (lower) quantile of the conditional distribution of these scientific output indicators; the coefficient of the number of editorial board members on the citations per paper is different when the university is at different quantiles of the conditional distribution of the citations per paper. We recommend that the number of editorial board members could be used as a beneficial supplement to indicators based on scientific output to improve the current academic evaluation system.