On April 22, 2021, Elsevier released its list of Highly Cited Chinese Researchers in 2020. A total of 112 scholars from Shanghai Jiao Tong University have been elected as "Chinese Most Cited Scholars" in 2020. Among them, Prof. Xue Hongwei, Prof. Tang Kexuan and Prof. Liu Ronghou from the School of Agriculture and Biology have been elected into this list.

Elsevier's "Highly Cited Chinese Researchers" list in 2020 uses Scopus, one of the most authoritative citation and index database in the world, as the data source for ranking the scientific research achievements of Chinese scholars. The review method from ARWU is adopted to select 4,023 Chinese scholars with the most influence glocally in various disciplines. This list covers 84 first-level disciplines from the ten categories under the Ministry of Education. This time was the seventh publication since it was first published in 2015.