A Comparative Study on SCIE Paper Output of Atmospheric Science Funding from NSFC and NSF

As China attaches great importance to the research of atmospheric science, the funding for the research has been increasing continuously. Taking the SCIE output from the atmospheric science projects funded by China’s National Natural Science Foundation (NSFC) and US National Science Foundation (NSF) during 2009-2021 as the study objects, this paper compares and analyzes the differences in the number of papers, their impacts, highly cited papers, and research themes between the two, so as to provide reference for the decision-making of atmospheric science research layout, resource allocation and policy making during the 14th Five-Year Plan period. The results show that the number of NSFC-funded papers in the field of atmospheric science has been increasing year by year, and the number of publications has surpassed that of NSF since 2011, but there is still a gap between the impact of NSFC-funded papers and NSF-funded papers. The international collaboration rate of highly cited papers has increased. It is true for both NSF-funded and NSFC-funded papers, but the international collaboration rate of the former is higher than that of the latter. The number of NSFC-funded highly cited papers equals that of NSF. Compared with NSFC highly-cited papers, which mainly focus on air pollution, air quality and PM_2.5 and other research topics of atmospheric chemistry, NSF highly-cited papers have a wider range of research topics. In the future, NSFC needs to expand the scale and scope of international collaborative funding, extend and deepen multilateral cooperation, and improve the level and depth of international scientific and technological cooperation. Meanwhile, NSFC needs to strengthen top-level design, strike a balance between basic theory and cutting-edge technology research, and focus on the effectiveness of funding in key areas. NSFC will play an important role in providing the fundamental theory and core technology behind the breakthrough and solution of the “bottleneck” key technical problems, so as to contribute to the realization of self-reliance and self-strengthening of Chinese meteorological science and technology.