Abstract: Major research plans (MRPs) funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) were proposed to integrate various programs from different scientific fields, academic thoughts and research levels, to promote interdisciplinary integration, improve research collaboration capabilities, and solve some cutting-edge and difficult scientific problems. Based on the literature data from Web of Science, this paper introduces the degree of interdisciplinarity and the consistency of research content to evaluate the performance of funded major research plans. It is concluded that: (1) MRPs generally promote the integration of interdisciplinary research and improve the ability of collaboration effectively, but various projects present distinctive degree of interdisciplinarity. MRPs led by department of mathematical sciences have higher integration, and led by department of management science comprise more disciplines than other departments; (2) Compared to the consistency of funding targets, the research contents obtained from scientific papers exist obvious discrepancy in different MRPs. The topics of these papers are related to the research objects, but are relatively poor in focusing degree. Overall, the interdisciplinary degree of MRPs is with great space to improve, and the consistency of research contents and objectives can be further raised.

Key words: performance evaluation, major research plans (MRPs), project objectives, interdisciplinarity, conformity evaluation