An analysis of international research collaboration based on research project data

International research collaboration is an important form of Science and Technology (S&T) research and is attracting an increasing attention from researchers. While other studies have examined collaboration using publication and patent data, this paper examines funded research collaborative project data by selecting collaborators affiliated with units outside Mainland China. Among a total of 320,000 National Natural Science Fund of China (NSFC) projects conducted from 2006 to 2016, 17,624 projects involving international research collaboration were extracted and included in our empirical analysis. Using the bibliometric method, this paper quantitatively analyses three aspects of the collaboration currently happening in Mainland China: collaboration activity, relative research efforts, and subject field of collaboration. The results demonstrate that among all 78 countries and regions of collaboration, the top fifteen account for 94.73% of all projects on record. The USA is the most important collaboration partner, but the number of research collaborations between the US and Mainland China is around the average of the top fifteen partners. Collaborations with Australia and Netherlands show an increasing trend, while collaborations with Japan and Germany decreased from 2006 to 2016. Of eight fields included in this analysis, the highest number of collaboration projects deal with health sciences, information science or management science.