National Key Research and Development Program of China

Papers in the tracked journals that name National Key Research and Development Program of China as a funder. Funders are the organisations OpenAlex links to a paper from its funding information (Crossref metadata and the paper's acknowledgements); a paper counts once for each funder it names. Grant numbers are not shown. Also as Markdown.

← Top research funders

Key findings#

From 2017 to 2026 (so far), National Key Research and Development Program of China was named as a funder of 7,729 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (6,357), operations research (784) and economics (242).
It ranks #3 among the funders of the tracked journals' papers from 2023 to 2025.
1,610 of them were published in 2025, against 125 in 2017.
Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (404), Tsinghua University (242) and University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (231).
The journals publishing most of them were Expert Systems with Applications (930), Pattern Recognition (502) and Knowledge-Based Systems (498).
The most-cited of them is “Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks” (IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2019), with 12,153 citations.

Papers per year#

20172026 (so far)

Papers per publication year and category
Category	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025	2026 (so far)
AI	94	170	293	437	569	745	923	953	1,354	819
Operations Research	9	15	33	56	101	79	105	101	153	132
Economics	17	14	26	44	29	16	22	21	25	28
Statistics	2	3	2	3	6	12	19	18	32	29
Finance	1	2	0	1	1	5	15	18	24	14
Management	0	2	3	9	12	6	6	4	7	5
Information Systems	0	4	7	3	7	6	2	4	4	2
Higher Education and Research	2	1	1	0	3	2	2	2	3	0
Health Economics and Policy	0	0	1	0	2	2	1	0	3	3
Tourism and Hospitality	0	0	1	2	2	1	3	0	2	0
Marketing	0	0	0	0	0	2	0	0	2	1
Accounting	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	1	0
All categories	125	211	367	555	732	876	1,098	1,122	1,610	1,033

Where the papers come from#

Journals with the most papers, since 2023
#	Journal	Papers
1	Expert Systems with Applications	930
2	Pattern Recognition	502
3	Knowledge-Based Systems	498
4	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	472
5	Neural Networks	383
6	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	368
7	Information Fusion	294
8	Computers & Industrial Engineering	113
9	Information Processing & Management	99
10	Transportation Research Part C Emerging Technologies	97

Institutions with the most papers, since 2023
#	Institution	Papers
1	Chinese Academy of Sciences	404
2	Tsinghua University	242
3	University of Chinese Academy of Sciences	231
4	Xi'an Jiaotong University	187
5	Zhejiang University	179
6	Beihang University	174
7	Wuhan University	154
8	Northwestern Polytechnical University	150
9	Harbin Institute of Technology	148
10	Tongji University	143

Countries with the most papers, since 2023
#	Country	Papers
1	China	4,797
2	United States	327
3	Hong Kong	289
4	United Kingdom	185
5	Australia	177
6	Singapore	175
7	Macao	79
8	Canada	71
9	Japan	55
10	France	44

Keywords with the most papers, since 2023
#	Keyword	Papers
1	graph neural networks	179
2	contrastive learning	162
3	large language models	158
4	attention mechanism	125
5	multimodal fusion	97
6	graph convolutional networks	93
7	knowledge distillation	85
8	interpretability	84
9	self-supervised learning	82
10	multi-task learning	77

Most-cited papers#

Most-cited papers since 2017
#	Citations	Per month	Title	Journal	Published	Authors
1	12,153	135.1	Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2019-05-02	Jie Hu, Li Shen, Samuel Albanie et al.
2	5,543	59.6	Object Detection With Deep Learning: A Review	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	2019-01-28	Zhong‐Qiu Zhao, Peng Zheng, Shou-Tao Xu et al.
3	2,626	24.0	Knowledge Graph Embedding: A Survey of Approaches and Applications	IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering	2017-09-20	Quan Wang, Zhendong Mao, Bin Wang et al.
4	1,833	20.5	NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understanding	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2019-05-14	Jun Liu, Amir Shahroudy, Mauricio Pérez et al.
5	1,808	21.8	GOT-10k: A Large High-Diversity Benchmark for Generic Object Tracking in the Wild	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2019-12-04	Lianghua Huang, Xin Zhao, Kaiqi Huang
6	1,659	20.9	Deep Learning on Graphs: A Survey	IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering	2020-03-17	Ziwei Zhang, Peng Cui, Wenwu Zhu
7	1,359	24.7	Towards Personalized Federated Learning	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	2022-03-28	Alysa Ziying Tan, Han Yu, Lizhen Cui et al.
8	1,331	22.0	Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2021-10-15	Pengfei Zhu, Longyin Wen, Dawei Du et al.
9	1,253	16.1	Deep Subdomain Adaptation Network for Image Classification	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	2020-05-04	Yongchun Zhu, Fuzhen Zhuang, Jindong Wang et al.
10	1,208	11.9	Heterogeneous Information Network Embedding for Recommendation	IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering	2018-05-07	Chuan Shi, Binbin Hu, Wayne Xin Zhao et al.

Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). National Key Research and Development Program of China. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 31, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/funders/national-key-research-and-development-program-of-china

@misc{scholar4ai-funders-national-key-research-and-development-program-of-china,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {National Key Research and Development Program of China},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/funders/national-key-research-and-development-program-of-china}},
  urldate = {2026-10-31},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

Free to reuse for non-commercial purposes with attribution (CC BY-NC 4.0).