Every year, the NSF asks: where did the money go? Who spent what, and where?
Displayed here are the 250 institutions (of 919 total) with the most R&D expenditures in the latest year, ranked within 33 subfields. Each cell is that university's national rank in that discipline. Blue means top N.
How to read it
- Click a university name or field header to sort by it
- Hover any cell for year-by-year rank & $ breakdown
- Arrange rows by field, Top-N count, or co-occurrence clusters
- Color by rank, absolute $, or share of the university's own R&D
- Year steps through FY2012 to FY2024
The distribution is the story: specialists lead one field, generalists spread across many, and co-occurrence makes institutional identities visible.
Read more on the three arrange modes
By Research Field groups columns by discipline — all engineering together, all life sciences together. Read across a row to see a university's full portfolio. Read down a column to see who leads in a single field and who doesn't show up at all.
By Count of Top‑N sorts by breadth. Set a threshold and the universities leading the most fields rise to the top. Low N surfaces specialists. High N surfaces generalists.
By Co‑occurrence doesn't ask who's best. It asks who's alike. Rows and columns reorder together, pulling universities with overlapping strengths toward each other. The clusters that form make visible institutional identities.