On April 22, Elsevier released the "Highly Cited Chinese Scholars" list of 2020. AIA Prof. ZENG Zhigang, Prof. SU Housheng from the Department of Systems Science and Engineering, Prof. GUAN Zhihong from the Department of Automatic Control, and Prof. PAN Linqiang and Prof. BAI Xiang from the Department of Intelligent Science and Technology were in the sub-list of Highly Cited Control Science and Engineering Scholars.

The list uses Scopus, a powerful citation and abstract database, to track the research results of Chinese scholars, and uses a method developed by Shanghai Ranking Consultancy to analyze the influence of scholars' research. The list was first released in 2015, since then, it has been updated annually for seven years and has captured a fair amount of media and academic attention.

The 2020 list has 4023 candidates from 373 institutions including universities, enterprises, and research institutes. It has ten sub-lists, each for one particular academic area, covering 84 disciplines in total. Elsevier has categorized academic areas in line with the framework of the first-level disciplines established by the Ministry of Education. By doing that, the list can better reflect the real situation of the academic dynamics in China. At the same time, the academic output of researchers can be analyzed more effectively and compared more fairly. This year, owing to the improved categorization, many new faces from segmented research areas have appeared on the list.