Linguistics and English Language has cause to celebrate – as well as enjoying our 50th anniversary as a department this summer, we also excelled in this year’s Stanford/Elsevier list of the top 2% of scientists in the world.

A quarter of the academic staff in our department are in the list, with a broad range of areas covered in the list including corpus linguistics (Gavin Brookes, Vaclav Brezina, Tony McEnery, Elena Semino) discourse analysis (Paul Baker, Chris Hart, Veronika Koller), pragmatics (Jonathan Culpeper) and second language acquisition/bilingualism (Judit Kormos, Alison Mackey, Jason Rothman).

We were also pleased to see retired colleagues, Charles Alderson, Paul Chilton, Norman Fairclough, Geoff Leech, Greg Myers, Mark Sebba and Ruth Wodak in this prestigious ranking.

Lancaster University can be rightly proud to have 103 active research staff in this year’s ranking. In its anniversary year, LAEL prides itself in making a particularly strong research contribution to the excellent research community at Lancaster, with three colleagues rated in the top ten of Lancaster’s current staff on the list: Jonathan Culpeper (4th), Judit Kormos (6th) and Paul Baker (9th).

Head of department, Professor Luke Harding, said “this a wonderful achievement for colleagues in the list and further demonstrates the strength, reach and impact of research produced within the Department of Linguistics and English Language”.

These achievements crown LAEL’s 50 years of achievement – here is to 50 more!

About Stanford/Elsevier’s Top 2% Scientist Rankings

Devised to show, through a wide range of bibliometric reports based on extensive citation data, the Stanford/Elsevier Top 2%, now in its 7th iteration. Produced by data scientists at Elsevier’s ICSR Lab, this prestigious ranking has rapidly established itself as a gold standard for identifying the world’s top researchers.