---
title: "National Science Foundation: funded research papers"
description: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), National Science Foundation was named as a funder of 7,872 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (2,285), operations research (2,034) and economics (1,865). It ranks #7 among the funders of the tracked journals' papers from 2023 to 2025."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/funders/national-science-foundation
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/funders/national-science-foundation.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), National Science Foundation was named as a funder of 7,872 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (2,285), operations research (2,034) and economics (1,865). (as of 2026-10-31)"
data_url: https://scholar4ai.com/data/rankings.json
updated: 2026-10-31T17:45:59+09:00
window: 2026-10-02 to 2026-10-31
source: OpenAlex (CC0)
---

# 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.

Back to the ranking: https://scholar4ai.com/rankings/funders.md

## Key findings

- From 2017 to 2026 (so far), National Science Foundation was named as a funder of 7,872 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (2,285), operations research (2,034) and economics (1,865).
- It ranks #7 among the funders of the tracked journals' papers from 2023 to 2025.
- 760 of them were published in 2025, against 902 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Georgia Institute of Technology (93), University of Michigan (83) 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

*Papers per publication year and category*

| Category | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 (so far) |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 232 | 224 | 247 | 247 | 247 | 254 | 233 | 230 | 227 | 144 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 252 | 225 | 214 | 187 | 206 | 218 | 182 | 177 | 198 | 175 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 246 | 241 | 210 | 226 | 211 | 151 | 167 | 166 | 148 | 99 |
| [Statistics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/statistics.md) | 72 | 91 | 69 | 81 | 78 | 76 | 64 | 66 | 62 | 50 |
| [Higher Education and Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/higher-education-and-research.md) | 32 | 29 | 22 | 15 | 23 | 20 | 29 | 40 | 47 | 20 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 19 | 28 | 22 | 23 | 27 | 28 | 17 | 20 | 23 | 17 |
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 26 | 31 | 24 | 21 | 18 | 16 | 13 | 12 | 27 | 9 |
| [Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/information-systems.md) | 14 | 21 | 20 | 17 | 15 | 14 | 18 | 19 | 14 | 10 |
| [Health Economics and Policy](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/health-economics-and-policy.md) | 2 | 3 | 5 | 1 | 8 | 8 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 7 |
| [Tourism and Hospitality](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/tourism-and-hospitality.md) | 4 | 5 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 7 | 2 | 4 | 2 |
| [Marketing](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/marketing.md) | 3 | 3 | 5 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| All categories | 902 | 901 | 842 | 824 | 838 | 792 | 736 | 742 | 760 | 535 |

## Where the papers come from

*Journals with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Transportation Research Part C Emerging Technologies](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/transportation-research-part-c-emerging-technologies.md) | 115 |
| 2 | [Mathematical Programming](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/mathematical-programming.md) | 111 |
| 3 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 87 |
| 4 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 87 |
| 5 | [Nature Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/nature-machine-intelligence.md) | 78 |
| 6 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 67 |
| 7 | [Journal of Econometrics](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/journal-of-econometrics.md) | 62 |
| 8 | [Transportation Research Part B Methodological](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/transportation-research-part-b-methodological.md) | 60 |
| 9 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 54 |
| 10 | [IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-artificial-intelligence.md) | 52 |

*Institutions with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | Georgia Institute of Technology | 93 |
| 2 | University of Michigan | 83 |
| 3 | University of Wisconsin–Madison | 75 |
| 4 | Carnegie Mellon University | 74 |
| 5 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 73 |
| 6 | Purdue University West Lafayette | 69 |
| 7 | University of California, Berkeley | 68 |
| 8 | Cornell University | 63 |
| 9 | Texas A&M University | 58 |
| 10 | Pennsylvania State University | 57 |

*Countries with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | United States | 2,359 |
| 2 | China | 369 |
| 3 | Switzerland | 194 |
| 4 | United Kingdom | 141 |
| 5 | Germany | 93 |
| 6 | Hong Kong | 82 |
| 7 | Canada | 79 |
| 8 | France | 73 |
| 9 | Australia | 69 |
| 10 | Netherlands | 59 |

*Keywords with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [large language models](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/large-language-models.md) | 48 |
| 2 | non-convex optimization | 46 |
| 3 | convergence rate | 45 |
| 4 | [COVID-19 pandemic](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/covid-19-pandemic.md) | 41 |
| 5 | approximation algorithms | 35 |
| 6 | [graph neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/graph-neural-networks.md) | 35 |
| 7 | uncertainty quantification | 34 |
| 8 | convergence analysis | 32 |
| 9 | computational efficiency | 31 |
| 10 | autonomous vehicles | 28 |

## 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](https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537-019-0197-0) | [Journal Of Big Data](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/journal-of-big-data.md) | 2019-07-06 | Connor Shorten, Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar |
| 2 | 10,982 | 138.6 | [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://doi.org/10.1109/tnnls.2020.2978386) | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0048-x) | [Nature Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/nature-machine-intelligence.md) | 2019-05-13 | Cynthia D Rudin |
| 4 | 10,493 | 128.8 | [From local explanations to global understanding with explainable AI for trees](https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0138-9) | [Nature Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/nature-machine-intelligence.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-019-01228-7) | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 2019-10-11 | Ramprasaath R. Selvaraju, Michael Cogswell, Abhishek Das et al. |
| 6 | 4,192 | 39.0 | [Learning without Forgetting](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2017.2773081) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2017-11-14 | Zhizhong Li, Derek Hoiem |
| 7 | 3,983 | 35.6 | [Places: A 10 Million Image Database for Scene Recognition](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2017.2723009) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1109/tnnls.2021.3070843) | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 2021-04-26 | Shaoxiong Ji, Shirui Pan, Erik Cambria et al. |
| 9 | 2,558 | 33.8 | [Event-Based Vision: A Survey](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2020.3008413) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2020.2992393) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 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

```bibtex
@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}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).