The Situation Of Rehabilitation Medicine Funding And A Bibliometric Analysis Of The Literature:Comparing China To The US

Objective The study aimed to identify the situation of rehabilitation research funding and articles funded by NSFC and NIH,and provide references for future rehabilitation funding.Methods Information for rehabilitation project number,budget,start and ended date,project ID number,funded institution,project leader and their location related to NSFC and NIH-funded projects from 2009-2018 was searched through the Science Output Service Website of NSFC and the NIH Project Report website.And all the articles reporting the funded research were identified and performed by the statistical analysis,such as descriptive research and negative binomial regression,and code in Python language were wrote for visual presentation of data via CKNI and PubMed Database.Results The NSFC funded 421 programs,and the NIH funded 312 different programs from 2009 to 2018.The budgets in both countries increased annually.The NSFC budget in 2018($3.89 million)was 8.46 times that in 2009($0.46 million).The NIH budget in 2018($36.08 million)was 2.17 times that in 2009($16.62 million).Shanghai,Guangdong and Zhejiang in China,and Pennsylvania,Texas and Illinois in the US were the provinces(states)that received the most funding from grant agencies.Most of the funded research institutions were located in the capital city or municipality directly under the central government of the province(state)where they were located,and the regional distribution was generally consistent with the top 10 funded provinces.The frequencies of the top 5 most common keywords that had appeared in the research by Chinese and US researchers in the study period was similar,which neuroscientific rehabilitation research was popular by researchers.The volumes of publications funded by NSFC and NIH were 1111 and 2571 desperately.The Impact Factors(IF)in both countries were most between from 0 to 3,and the journals with IF above 6 published more articles from the NIH(297)than from NSFC(18).The numbers of SCI papers funded by NSFC and NIH increased by a factor of 2.25 and 0.05 for each unit of increase in the project budgets(million dollars)in China and the US.Conclusions With the funding by the NSFC and the NIH respectively,research in rehabilitation in both countries have increased significantly during the last 10 years,and there was still a gap between the two countries.We still need to strengthen the theoretical research on the underlying mechanisms and improve the quality of the literature,as the standard in-depth and continuous research development and the strict review mechanism are conducive to the progress of rehabilitation medicine research.