In this paper, we study the existence of positive ground state solutions for the nonlinear fractional Schrödinger equation: (−∆)αu + V(x)u = f (u), inRN, where N ≥ 2, α ∈ (0, 1), f ∈ C1(R,R) is subcritical near infinity and superlinear near zero and satisfies the Berestycki–Lions condition. Using the monotonic trick established by Struwe–Jeanjean, the method of Pohozaev manifold and establishing a global compactness lemma, we show that the above problem has at least a positive ground state solution. © 2017, © 2017 I...