National Natural Science Foundation of China

Papers in the tracked journals that name National Natural Science Foundation 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.

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Key findings#

From 2017 to 2026 (so far), National Natural Science Foundation of China was named as a funder of 75,108 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (40,300), operations research (12,475) and economics (6,855).
It ranks #1 among the funders of the tracked journals' papers from 2023 to 2025.
14,133 of them were published in 2025, against 2,928 in 2017.
Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (1,805), Tsinghua University (1,371) and Sun Yat-sen University (1,193).
The journals publishing most of them were Expert Systems with Applications (5,375), Pattern Recognition (3,077) and Knowledge-Based Systems (2,642).
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	1,240	1,599	1,944	2,619	3,174	4,166	4,728	5,787	8,278	6,765
Operations Research	709	901	982	1,096	1,108	1,216	1,193	1,508	1,996	1,766
Economics	340	426	541	602	601	595	723	897	1,201	929
Finance	118	242	294	412	462	616	717	965	1,132	735
Management	164	180	218	205	362	290	327	382	472	473
Statistics	175	185	170	185	172	151	168	195	245	218
Information Systems	67	122	157	149	127	162	178	193	257	219
Tourism and Hospitality	29	49	82	107	122	111	112	166	237	185
Higher Education and Research	54	57	57	76	87	86	68	98	93	106
Marketing	11	21	51	54	69	58	56	115	127	124
Accounting	19	16	20	30	31	47	34	61	60	71
Health Economics and Policy	2	4	7	8	12	12	18	31	35	31
All categories	2,928	3,802	4,523	5,543	6,327	7,510	8,322	10,398	14,133	11,622

Where the papers come from#

Journals with the most papers, since 2023
#	Journal	Papers
1	Expert Systems with Applications	5,375
2	Pattern Recognition	3,077
3	Knowledge-Based Systems	2,642
4	Neural Networks	2,065
5	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	1,987
6	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	1,621
7	Information Fusion	1,539
8	IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering	1,228
9	Applied Intelligence	1,167
10	Computers & Industrial Engineering	985

Institutions with the most papers, since 2023
#	Institution	Papers
1	Chinese Academy of Sciences	1,805
2	Tsinghua University	1,371
3	Sun Yat-sen University	1,193
4	Xi'an Jiaotong University	1,160
5	Zhejiang University	1,158
6	Hong Kong Polytechnic University	1,133
7	University of Chinese Academy of Sciences	1,101
8	Wuhan University	1,099
9	Harbin Institute of Technology	1,064
10	Beihang University	1,063

Countries with the most papers, since 2023
#	Country	Papers
1	China	43,609
2	United States	3,296
3	Hong Kong	2,872
4	United Kingdom	2,208
5	Australia	1,741
6	Singapore	1,220
7	Canada	880
8	Macao	750
9	France	413
10	Japan	374

Keywords with the most papers, since 2023
#	Keyword	Papers
1	China	1,982
2	graph neural networks	1,026
3	Chinese listed companies	964
4	contrastive learning	964
5	large language models	911
6	attention mechanism	740
7	multimodal fusion	596
8	financial constraints	561
9	state-owned enterprises	557
10	class imbalance	519

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	5,262	81.3	A Survey of Convolutional Neural Networks: Analysis, Applications, and Prospects	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	2021-06-10	Zewen Li, Fan Liu, Wenjie Yang et al.
4	3,404	39.6	Res2Net: A New Multi-Scale Backbone Architecture	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2019-08-30	Shanghua Gao, Ming‐Ming Cheng, Kai Zhao et al.
5	2,963	35.3	Deep Learning for Generic Object Detection: A Survey	International Journal of Computer Vision	2019-10-31	Li Liu, Wanli Ouyang, Xiaogang Wang et al.
6	2,904	43.3	A Survey on Multi-Task Learning	IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering	2021-03-31	Yu Zhang, Qiang Yang
7	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.
8	2,413	31.7	Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2020-06-29	Yulan Guo, Hanyun Wang, Qingyong Hu et al.
9	2,350	29.9	Financial markets under the global pandemic of COVID-19	Finance research letters	2020-04-16	Dayong Zhang, Min Hu, Qiang Ji
10	2,308	30.7	U2Fusion: A Unified Unsupervised Image Fusion Network	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2020-07-28	Han Xu, Jiayi Ma, Junjun Jiang et al.

Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). National Natural Science Foundation of China. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 31, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/funders/national-natural-science-foundation-of-china

@misc{scholar4ai-funders-national-natural-science-foundation-of-china,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {National Natural Science Foundation of China},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/funders/national-natural-science-foundation-of-china}},
  urldate = {2026-10-31},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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