Do scientific research funds support emerging topic research in Chinese humanities and social sciences?

Abstract Although the research funding policy has promoted the output and effect of research, whether it can identify innovative research topics and promote discipline development is worth investigating in depth. Taking Chinese humanities and social sciences (HSS) as an example, this study uses the latent Dirichlet allocation topic model to identify the topics of the HSS projects and papers funded by China’s national research funds. The analysis reveals the effect of research funding policy on research topics in both topic selection and funding intensity: (1) the types of projects with strict restrictions on topics significantly guide the direction of research topics; (2) projects with less funding are more likely to result in emerging topic research; and (3) compared with social sciences and key universities, the funded projects of humanities and other institutions are more likely to focus on emerging topics.