National Science Foundation

Papers in the tracked journals that name National Science Foundation 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 Science Foundation was named as a funder of 7,683 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (2,285), operations research (2,034) and economics (1,712).
It ranks #7 among the funders of the tracked journals' papers from 2023 to 2025.
743 of them were published in 2025, against 880 in 2017.
Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Georgia Institute of Technology (92), University of Michigan (82) and University of Wisconsin–Madison (75).
The journals publishing most of them were Transportation Research Part C Emerging Technologies (115), Mathematical Programming (111) and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (87).
The most-cited of them is “A survey on Image Data Augmentation for Deep Learning” (Journal Of Big Data, 2019), with 13,151 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	232	224	247	247	247	254	233	230	227	144
Operations Research	252	225	214	187	206	218	182	177	198	175
Economics	225	214	190	216	193	140	155	153	134	92
Statistics	72	91	69	81	78	76	64	66	62	50
Higher Education and Research	32	27	20	14	22	18	29	40	46	18
Management	19	27	21	23	24	25	15	19	21	15
Finance	26	31	24	21	18	16	13	12	27	9
Information Systems	13	20	20	17	14	13	17	17	14	8
Health Economics and Policy	2	3	5	1	8	7	5	6	7	7
Tourism and Hospitality	4	5	3	4	3	3	7	2	4	2
Marketing	3	3	5	1	2	4	1	2	1	2
Accounting	0	0	1	1	0	0	0	2	2	0
All categories	880	870	819	813	815	774	721	726	743	522

Where the papers come from#

Journals with the most papers, since 2023
#	Journal	Papers
1	Transportation Research Part C Emerging Technologies	115
2	Mathematical Programming	111
3	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	87
4	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	87
5	Nature Machine Intelligence	78
6	Neural Networks	67
7	Journal of Econometrics	62
8	Transportation Research Part B Methodological	60
9	Expert Systems with Applications	54
10	IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence	52

Institutions with the most papers, since 2023
#	Institution	Papers
1	Georgia Institute of Technology	92
2	University of Michigan	82
3	University of Wisconsin–Madison	75
4	Carnegie Mellon University	74
5	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	72
6	Purdue University West Lafayette	67
7	University of California, Berkeley	67
8	Cornell University	60
9	Texas A&M University	58
10	Pennsylvania State University	57

Countries with the most papers, since 2023
#	Country	Papers
1	United States	2,315
2	China	365
3	Switzerland	181
4	United Kingdom	133
5	Germany	89
6	Hong Kong	81
7	Canada	78
8	France	71
9	Australia	67
10	Netherlands	57

Keywords with the most papers, since 2023
#	Keyword	Papers
1	large language models	47
2	non-convex optimization	46
3	convergence rate	45
4	COVID-19 pandemic	39
5	approximation algorithms	35
6	graph neural networks	35
7	uncertainty quantification	34
8	convergence analysis	32
9	computational efficiency	31
10	autonomous vehicles	27

Most-cited papers#

Most-cited papers since 2017
#	Citations	Per month	Title	Journal	Published	Authors
1	13,151	149.7	A survey on Image Data Augmentation for Deep Learning	Journal Of Big Data	2019-07-06	Connor Shorten, Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar
2	10,982	138.6	A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	2020-03-24	Zonghan Wu, Shirui Pan, Fengwen Chen et al.
3	10,516	117.3	Stop explaining black box machine learning models for high stakes decisions and use interpretable models instead	Nature Machine Intelligence	2019-05-13	Cynthia D Rudin
4	10,493	128.8	From local explanations to global understanding with explainable AI for trees	Nature Machine Intelligence	2020-01-17	Scott Lundberg, Gabriel Erion, Hugh Chen et al.
5	6,898	81.5	Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-Based Localization	International Journal of Computer Vision	2019-10-11	Ramprasaath R. Selvaraju, Michael Cogswell, Abhishek Das et al.
6	4,192	39.0	Learning without Forgetting	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2017-11-14	Zhizhong Li, Derek Hoiem
7	3,983	35.6	Places: A 10 Million Image Database for Scene Recognition	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2017-07-04	Bolei Zhou, Àgata Lapedriza, Aditya Khosla et al.
8	2,940	44.4	A Survey on Knowledge Graphs: Representation, Acquisition, and Applications	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	2021-04-26	Shaoxiong Ji, Shirui Pan, Erik Cambria et al.
9	2,558	33.8	Event-Based Vision: A Survey	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2020-07-10	Guillermo Gallego, Tobi Delbrück, Garrick Orchard et al.
10	2,036	26.1	Self-Supervised Visual Feature Learning With Deep Neural Networks: A Survey	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2020-05-04	Longlong Jing, Yingli Tian

Cite this page

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

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

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