Data and Research Hotspot Analyses of National Natural Science Foundation of China in Automation Field

The statistics and analyses of applications and grants in automation field of National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) for 1986 to 2017, show that the NSFC support has become an important research funding resource, that the size of research staff, the amount of the research findings, and the number of granted applications are steadily increasing, and that the research teams are becoming younger. Through data-mining different research hotspots and their changes for the past 30 years, it is found that the research in automation of China is closely keeping pace with the state-of-the-art, and that the theoretic hotspots are more than the application ones while the percentage of approved applications in application-oriented research is rising year by year. The data and findings of this paper can also serve as a reference for Chinese researchers to refer to research interests in the automation field.