This marks the second discipline from the Faculty of Science and Engineering (FoSE) to enter the top 1% of the ESI, and the fourth from UNNC overall. Previously, UNNC's Engineering discipline first made the ESI global top 1% list in 2019, advanced to the top 0.5% in 2021, and further climbed to 0.24% by May 2024, demonstrating a remarkable improvement.

In the past years, Faculty of Science and Engineering keeps attracting top scholars and experts around the globe to promote the development of teaching and research. The faculty team consists of experienced researchers and scholars who are leaders in their respective research fields. They provide first-class STEM education to students and drive research innovation and industrial transformation. The faculty’s high-level scholars have been recognized on various prestigious global lists.

17 scholars from the FoSE and Nottingham Ningbo China Beacons of Excellence Research and Innovation Institute of UNNC were included in the single-year database and five scholars in the career-long database of Stanford-Elsevier list of world’s top 2% scientists released in October 2023.

Professor Xiaosu Yi, one of the top 2% scientists in the materials subfield in 2023, has gained - along with his research team - various achievements in developing sustainable materials, multifunctional composites and advanced aeronautical composite technology.

Professor Xiaogang Yang, Head of the Department of Mechanical, Materials and Manufacturing Engineering and Head of the Advanced Intelligent Manufacturing Research Group, stated, "This achievement is the result of the collective efforts of all our faculty and researchers. Our research teams in composites, advanced manufacturing, green building materials, energy materials and so on have all made significant contributions to the development of the materials science discipline."

Using data from the SciVal database (2020-2024) as an example, the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) of UNNC's Materials Science reached 1.64, on par with top global universities such as Caltech, UCL, and Cambridge. Notably, 18.2% of their publications were listed in top 10% most-cited worldwide, and 35.9% are published in the world's top 10% journals.

For a faculty that has only been established for 15 years, these figures highlight its high productivity, quality, and rapid growth, signifying a swift increase in the international academic influence of UNNC's Materials Science and other disciplines.

The ESI database is based on over 12 million records from more than 12,000 academic journals indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). Covering 22 professional fields, it uses six major indicators—number of papers, citation frequency, average citations per paper, highly cited papers, hot papers, and frontier papers—to comprehensively measure national and regional research levels, institutional academic reputation, scientist academic influence, and journal academic standards. Updated every two months, ESI is one of the most important tools for evaluating global universities and academic institutions' academic levels, research outcomes, and tracking discipline development trends. Disciplines ranked in the top 1% globally are generally considered to have reached an international high-level standard.