According to the recent Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), Sichuan University, with a total of 270 projects during the period 2016-2019, ranked third in China in terms of the number of the National Social Science Fund of China (NSSFC) projects. These projects included major projects, key projects, youth projects, general projects, post-funded projects and western projects.

In recent years, our university attaches great importance to the prosperity of philosophy and social sciences, and has issued a series of documents such as “Several Opinions of Sichuan University on the Prosperity of Philosophy and Social Sciences” so as to accelerate the development strategy of “excellent liberal arts”. In the past four years, SCU has been in the forefront with regard to the number of the NSSFC projects. For instance, SCU ranked first among all Chinese universities in the number of annual projects for three consecutive years, and ranked second in terms of the amount of the NSSFC projects in 2018 and 2019 in China.

Being the only state-level program for humanities and social sciences research, the National Social Science Fund of China (hereinafter referred to as Social Science Fund) is generally regarded as the most influential and authoritative research fund project in the field of humanities and social sciences. Hence, the number of Social Science Fund projects can reflect the research productivity and academic competitiveness of scientific research institutions in the field of humanities and social sciences, and it is an important indicator to gauge their research level of humanities and social science. During the period between 2016 and 2019, NSSFC funded 12,915 general projects, 4,455 youth projects, 2,506 post-funded projects, 1,961 western projects, 1,545 key projects, 1,368 major projects, and 24,750 projects of six other sub categories. Among them, 22,567 projects were from 808 universities.