Effect of national policies on the researchers’ interests in Mainland China: a case study of the Yangtze River Delta region

To understand the guiding effect of national macro-policies on the researchers’ interest in Mainland China, a bibliometric investigation of the research publications in Chinese related to the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region, China, was conducted. After analyzing 5305 articles derived from China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) platform during the period from 2000 to 2020, the main research conclusions were as followed. Firstly, the implementation of the national policies had great impact on the scientific research activities. The evolutionary trend of the research hotspots basically coincided with the needs from the national economic and social development. Secondly, the collaborative network among different institutions had been formed preliminarily, while the collaborative degree was relatively low and the research repeatability in the same field was relatively high. Few articles finished by different research institutions indicated that the academic contribution was distributed point-like, single-core clustering and incompact academic collaboration-network. Thirdly, the researchers in Mainland China had different focuses according to the issued national policies. The systematization of the existing studies was not obvious and most research perspectives came primarily from a single discipline. The future research hotspots related to the YRD region should focus on industrial structure, regional integration, and high-quality development. Finally, concrete mechanism and policy guidance about the coordinated development of different industries in the YRD region should be established scientifically to keep the leading role in the process of China’s modernization. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023.