University of Auckland: Auckland researchers make Stanford top two percent

Professors Lawrence Zhang and Stephen May, from the Faculty of Education and Social Work, and Professors Helen Basturkmen and Gary Barkhuizen in the Faculty of Arts, have all been named in the top two percent of scientists globally on Stanford University’s latest rankings list.

Professors Zhang and May are ranked in the areas of linguistics and language education respectively and Professors Basturkmen and Barkhuizen both make the list in the field of applied linguistics and language teaching.

Professor Jim Metson, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research, says this ranking is an excellent indication of the high quality of the University’s social science research.

“It is really encouraging to see the excellence of these four scholars recognised in this way. This area has been a strength of the University for some time, as reflected in this outstanding result.”

This is Stanford’s fourth release since it started the rankings using bibliometric analysis – which involves statistical evaluation of published scientific articles, books or chapters – in 2019.

Scientists were divided into 22 fields and 176 sub fields, and the world ranking was created from nearly seven million scientists according to ‘career influence’ and ‘annual influence’.

The four researchers from the University of Auckland join five from Victoria University of Wellington and one from Auckland University of Technology to make only ten New Zealand scholars on this year’s list.

Stanford itself is consistently ranked in the top five universities in the world.