Abstract: Basic research plays a key role in technological innovation and social and economic development. It is of great significance to understand the layout of basic research and optimize and adjust the layout in time. Based on the ESI database, four countries including China, the United States, Japan and Germany are analyzed from three aspects: all published papers, Top papers, and basic discipline papers, and discipline weights and polarization indicators are used to reveal the focus and balance of the basic research layout of each country. In terms of the layout focus, China's dominant disciplines are concentrated in the engineering and science categories, and the basic discipline structure is relatively balanced. In comparison, space science and life science are relatively weak. The United States has more dominant disciplines and a more comprehensive layout. The United States, Japan and Germany focus more on the fields of life sciences, medicine, and space sciences. In the past ten years, China’s basic research has developed rapidly, the total weight of disciplines has been increasing, and the degree of polarization has been decreasing. The contribution to the world’s basic research has become greater and greater, and its development has become more and more comprehensive and balanced. The United States still occupies a dominant position, but it is showing a downward trend. In particular, the development of basic disciplines in China has been remarkable in the past five years, and its overall contribution to world science has approached that of the United States. The development pattern of Japan and Germany is basically stable. On the whole, our country has developed relatively rapidly, and the distribution of disciplines is focused, but the balance needs to be further developed. The future development strategy of basic research and basic disciplines should be based on country's actual conditions, taking into account the social and economic needs and the internal logic of discipline development, coordinating the proportions of different disciplines, and optimizing the layout of basic research.