  Every year many scholars are funded by the China Scholarship Council (CSC).
The CSC is a funding agency established by the Chinese government with the main
initiative of training Chinese scholars to conduct research abroad and to
promote international collaboration. In this study, we identified these
CSC-funded scholars sponsored by the China Scholarship Council based on the
acknowledgments text indexed by the Web of Science. Bibliometric data of their
publications were collected to track their scientific mobility in different
fields, and to evaluate the performance of the CSC scholarship in promoting
international collaboration by sponsoring the mobility of scholars. Papers
funded by the China Scholarship Council are mainly from the fields of natural
sciences and engineering sciences. There are few CSC-funded papers in the field
of social sciences and humanities. CSC-funded scholars from mainland China have
the United States, Australia, Canada, and some European countries, such as
Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands, as their preferential mobility
destinations across all fields of science. CSC-funded scholars published most
of their papers with international collaboration during the mobility period,
with a decrease in the share of international collaboration after the support
of the scholarship.
