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Michel Foucault, the late French philosopher and historian, long held the distinction as the only researcher to surpass more than one million citations on Google Scholar. These days, however, Foucault has company: A.I. pioneer Yoshua Bengio.
Last month, Bengio became the first living scientist to have his work cited more than one million times on Google Scholar. Citations to his research have surged in recent years, with more than 730,000 recorded since 2020 and roughly 135,000 in 2024 alone.
Often dubbed one of the “Godfathers of A.I.,” Bengio’s work in deep learning helped lay the foundations for much of today’s A.I. revolution. A founder of the Mila-Quebec AI Institute and a professor of computer science at the University of Montreal, Bengio recently launched LawZero, a nonprofit focused on developing safety-centered A.I. systems to assist in scientific research.
“This Google Scholar citation count reflects the extensive impact of Professor Bengio’s research in deep learning, which serves as a foundation for countless other scientific and technological advancements worldwide,” said Hugo Larochelle, who earlier this year succeeded Bengio as scientific director of Mila, in a statement.
Bengio, alongside fellow A.I. researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, received the 2018 Turing Award—often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing”— for their breakthroughs in neural networks. The trio also co-authored Bengio’s second most-cited paper. Hinton, who currently has nearly 980,000 citations on Google Scholar, is also on track to soon join Bengio in the million-citation club, according to Mila.
Researchers in fields like A.I., machine learning and cancer research are more likely to accumulate high citation counts due to widespread interest and rapid publication cycles, said Daniel Sage, a mathematics professor at the University of Buffalo who studies citation metrics.
Top-cited scholars tend to work “in certain fields which have a lot of people working in them, and a lot of papers being produced,” he told Observer.
The growing fascination with A.I. has even boosted citation counts of researchers outside the field. For example, Terence Tao, a renowned mathematician and Fields medalist, has earned more than 100,000 Google Scholar citations. Many of his top-cited papers, however, were actually published in electrical engineering or computer science journals, rather than pure mathematics, said Sage.
“It’s apples and oranges comparisons if you try to compare people in A.I. vs. people in various other fields,” he added, noting that Google Scholar generally reports higher citation counts than other data providers such as Web of Science due to its broader indexing criteria.
That said, reaching one million citations remains a remarkable achievement. “It’s still incredibly impressive,” said Sage. “One has to take these kinds of things with a grain of salt, but it is a sign both of the hotness of the field and the quality of the work within the field.”
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Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly
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