Against the backdrop of deepening education evaluation reform in China’s new era, the optimization of research evaluation systems has become essential to the intrinsic development of university disciplines. Taking Trans-portation Engineering at Southwest Jiaotong University as a representative case, the analysis examines the con-trast between its sustained A+ performance in the Ministry of Education’s disciplinary evaluation and its rank-ings, which consistently remained outside the top ten in the ShanghaiRanking Global Ranking of Academic Subjects from 2017 to 2025. Comparable cases from other universities are also drawn upon to elucidate broader challenges faced by Chinese disciplines with distinctive strengths in the context of international competition. The findings indicate that insufficient interdisciplinary integration, a lag in reorienting evaluation frameworks, the structural deficiencies in the system for cultivating high-quality research outputs, and limited depth of inter-national collaboration are the primary factors behind this discrepancy. Based on the analysis of the focal case and supporting evidence from comparable cases, a four-dimensional pathway is proposed, encompassing the re-structuring of the disciplinary ecosystem, innovation in evaluation mechanisms, the strengthening of research output cultivation systems, and the deepening of international collaboration. These findings provide theoretical insights and practical implications for the development of world-class disciplines featuring Chinese characteris-tics.