Trends and hotspots in NSFC funded research: A bibliometric analysis based on Vosviewer and Citespace

The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) is a crucial channel for supporting basic research in China, and the trends and hotspots of its funded research have significant impacts on the development of science and technology in China. However, the effectiveness of NSFC-funded original and disruptive research has not yet been quantitatively studied. There is a lack of comprehensive analysis on the regional and institutional distribution of NSFC-funded papers in the two top-tier journals, Nature and Science, as well as the situation of international cooperation and hot research fields. This study adopts bibliometric methods and uses Citespace and VOSviewer software to study the papers published in Nature and Science journals funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China over the past decade. The results indicate that the number of high-quality papers funded by the NSFC has grown nearly five-fold, making it the most prolific funding type for papers in "Nature" and "Science". The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University, and Peking University are the top three institutions in terms of the number of NSFC-funded papers. Also, Chinese scholars have close collaborations with universities such as Harvard University and Stanford University. In terms of research fields, life science fields such as protein crystal structure, active sites, and DNA methylation are the most concentrated areas funded by the NSFC for high-quality papers, followed by climate change research and material structure research. Burst detection analysis of keywords shows that "cryo-electron microscopy structure" and "structural basis" have the highest burst intensity, indicating that structural biology is a hot research area for high-quality papers funded by the NSFC.