Abstract:This article employs SciVal’’s scientific research management and analysis platform and takes the high-level university clusters of four world-class bay areas the research sample. It comparatively analyzes their research productivity by using multi-dimensional performance indicators such as scholarly outputs, academic impact, disciplinary characteristics and forms of research collaboration, It also identifies the advantageous and disadvantageous disciplines and analyzes the impact of research collaboration on research output. The results show that the research output of high-level university cluster in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) is less than other bay areas, however the academic impact in the GBA had surpassed that of the Tokyo bay area, paralleled to that of the New York bay area, and was approaching to that of the San Francisco bay area. The proportion of industry-university collaboration in the GBA much lower than the other three world-class bay areas, which means the spillover effect of knowledge production on industry and economic development need to be improved. At the present, a unique group of advantageous disciplines have emerged and it is expected to further expand in size and the boundaries of research collaboration should be expanded in order to increase the impact of research output.