On September 11, Clarivate Analytics announced the latest ESI (Essential Science Indicators) subject rankings. The Biology & Biochemistry discipline of Qingdao University of Science and Technology (QUST) has successfully entered the ESI global top 1%, marking that the discipline has achieved a high level of academic influence and scientific research capabilities internationally, joined the ranks of world-class disciplines, and representing another important breakthrough in QUST’s discipline development.

To date, QUST has 6 disciplines listed in the ESI global top 1%, including Chemistry, Engineering, Materials Science, Environmental Science & Ecology, Computer Science, and the newly added Biology & Biochemistry. Among them, Chemistry ranks among the ESI global top 1‰ with a current percentile of 0.532‰, and the rankings of the other disciplines have also steadily improved compared with the previous period.

In recent years, closely focusing on technological development and national strategic needs, QUST has continuously optimized the mechanism for adjusting discipline and program settings, seized the important opportunity of accelerating the construction of a strong education country and province, and adhered to leading the university’s high-quality development through discipline construction. The university has fully implemented Shandong Province’s 811 Project for first-class discipline construction as the top priority for high-quality development, followed the discipline development policy of “Strengthening Engineering, Enriching Science, Refining Humanities, and Emphasizing Interdisciplinarity”, built the “four beams and eight pillars” of the discipline construction mechanism, and constructed a “V-formation” discipline development system. By continuously optimizing the discipline layout, improving the level of discipline construction, and actively creating a first-class discipline ecological system, QUST is contributing to its high-quality development and striving to build an innovative, interdisciplinary, and international high-level university with “distinctive characteristics and leading positions”.

Essential Science Indicators (ESI) is a basic analytical and evaluation tool launched by ISI, a world-renowned academic information publishing organization, to measure scientific research performance and track scientific development trends. Its data is sourced from the Web of Science database. ESI has become one of the most important evaluation indicators globally for assessing the academic level and influence of universities and disciplines. The ESI rankings are released every two months.