The internationally renowned publisher Elsevier recently released the World's Top 2% Scientists through its repository, Mendeley Data. The list included "Career-Long Impact Rankings (1960–2021)" and "2021 Single Year Impact Rankings." National Chi Nan University (NCNU) has a total of 10 scientists on the list of the world's top 2% scientists, indicating that NCNU has ample academic capacity and an outstanding faculty lineup. Therefore, NCNU can continue to attract and enroll excellent students under the trend of a declining birthrate.

The list was established by Professor John P.A. Ioannidis of Stanford University and his team based on the statistics from Elsevier's Scopus, the world's largest citation and abstract database. The 2021 list was calculated using author data from Scopus as of September 1st, 2022, and was divided into 22 fields and 176 subfields, according to composite scores that considered six metrics, including "total citations," "co-authorship-adjusted Schreiber Hm-index," "number of citations to papers as a single author," "number of citations to papers as single or first author," "number of citations to papers as single, first or last author," and "H-index." The rankings were provided for 22 scientific fields and 176 sub-fields, and the selection was based on the analysis of the composite indicators of the top 100,000 scientists worldwide.

Six NCNU professors were listed in the career-long impact rankings this time, including Ching-Yao Lin (林敬堯) of the Department of Applied Chemistry; Hong-Yu Chien (簡宏宇), Ping-Feng Pai (白炳豐), and Chun-Che Huang (黃俊哲) of the Department of Information Management; Yo-Sheng Lin (林佑昇) of the Department of Electrical Engineering; and Su-Shia Lin (林素霞) of the Department of Applied Materials and Optoelectronic Engineering. Among them, Professor Ching-Yao Lin's top 1,000 career-long impact ranking in sub-fields is the most eye-catching. In addition, four professors were selected for the list of the 2021 Single Year Impact Rankings, including Ping-Feng Pai and Hung-Yu Chien of the Department of Information Management, Ching-Yao Lin of the Department of Applied Chemistry, and Chun-Ying Huang (黃俊穎) of the Department of Applied Materials and Optoelectronic Engineering.