Four professors from the Department of Linguistics, Languages and Cultures at Michigan State University are among the top 2% of scientists in the world, according to Stanford University’s latest World’s Top 2% Scientists list, which identifies scholars who are top-cited in their respective fields.

First released in 2019, the Stanford University World’s Top 2% Scientists list is updated annually, with the seventh and latest version published in Fall 2024, which includes 100,000 scholars from more than 20 fields and 174 subfields, highlighting research contributions for the 2023 calendar year.

The ranking is based on an analysis of citation impact across multiple scientific fields and subfields using data from Scopus, a large multidisciplinary database that indexes scientific journals from the health sciences, life sciences, physical sciences and social sciences. The ranking considers scholars who have published multiple highly cited papers and evaluates the citation impact of their work using various metrics, taking into account both career-long citation impact and the impact in a single recent year.