The Impact of “Double First-Class” Initiative on Research Performance in Leading Agricultural and Forestry Universities in China

Using panel data from 38 leading agricultural and forestry universities in China from 2018 to 2023, this study employs a difference-in-differences (DID) model to assess the impact of the second round of the “Double First-Class” initiative on the research performance of sectoral (Agricultural and Forestry) universities. The empirical results show that the policy significantly improves research performance. Following its implementation, the Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI), the number of ESI-indexed publications, and total citation counts increased by approximately 9.5%, 49.9%, and 74.6%, respectively. This indicates that the “Double First-Class” initiative has achieved notable gains in terms of research output quantity, quality, and international academic impact. These findings are robust to a series of sensitivity checks. Further heterogeneity analysis shows that the policy promotes the publication of TOP papers in universities jointly sponsored by central ministries and provincial governments, raises citation counts in non–jointly sponsored universities, and significantly increases both citation frequencies and CNCI scores for agricultural and forestry universities in both northern and southern China. Based on these findings, we put forward policy recommendations for the next phase of the “Double First-Class” initiative.