AI Pioneer Yoshua Bengio Becomes First Living Scientist to Reach One Million Citations

'Godfather of AI' becomes first person to hit one million citations

Computer scientist Yoshua Bengio has become the first person to have their work cited more than one million times on the search engine Google Scholar. Bengio, who is based at the University of Montreal in Canada, is known for his pioneering research on machine learning. He has been called one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence (AI), alongside computer scientists Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto in Canada and Yann LeCun at the technology company Meta in New York City. The trio shared the A. M. Turing Award -- the most prestigious prize in computer science -- in 2019 for work on neural networks. Bengio's top-cited papers include one he co-authored in 2014 titled Generative Adversarial Nets, which has more than more than 105,000 Google Scholar citations, as well as a Nature review paper he wrote with LeCun and Hinton. The list also includes papers on 'attention', a technique that helps machines to analyse text. Attention became one of the crucial innovations that fuelled the chatbot revolution, starting with ChatGPT in 2022. The "remarkable" achievement highlights the tremendous growth in popularity of machine learning, says Kaiming He, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who is an author on the most-cited paper of the twenty-first century, according to a Nature analysis published earlier this year. Of the top ten most cited papers this century, eight were on machine learning. "AI is changing the world, and we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg," Bengio tells Nature. Bengio's "track record is clearly outstanding", says Alberto Martín Martín, an information scientist at the University of Granada in Spain. But he adds that raw citation counts are "crude metrics" that some less-scrupulous researchers have learnt to manipulate, and he does not think that universities should use the rankings for marketing. Different bibliometric platforms -- such as Web of Science, Scopus and OpenAlex -- rank researchers in a different way to Google Scholar, and often result in lower overall numbers of citations, as the Nature analysis found. As well as in peer-reviewed journals, Google Scholar tracks citations in books and preprints posted anywhere on the Internet. Bengio says he is an "avid user" of Google Scholar, which celebrated two decades since its founding last year. "I think it has revolutionized science. It makes it so much easier to do things that would otherwise take painstaking efforts," he says. But he adds that he pays "as little as possible" attention to his own citation count. "It should not become an objective for researchers to have more citations, because it leads into trying to optimize this rather than do good science and go after the truth."

'Godfather of AI' Breaks Major Science Research Record

I agree my information will be processed in accordance with the Scientific American and Springer Nature Limited Privacy Policy. We leverage third party services to both verify and deliver email. By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. Computer scientist Yoshua Bengio has become the first person to have their work cited more than one million times on the search engine Google Scholar. Bengio, who is based at the University of Montreal in Canada, is known for his pioneering research on machine learning. He has been called one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence (AI), alongside computer scientists Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto in Canada and Yann LeCun at the technology company Meta in New York City. The trio shared the A. M. Turing Award -- the most prestigious prize in computer science -- in 2019 for work on neural networks. Bengio's top-cited papers include one he co-authored in 2014 titled Generative Adversarial Nets, which has more than 105,000 Google Scholar citations, as well as a Nature review paper he wrote with LeCun and Hinton. The list also includes papers on 'attention', a technique that helps machines to analyse text. Attention became one of the crucial innovations that fuelled the chatbot revolution, starting with ChatGPT in 2022. If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. The "remarkable" achievement highlights the tremendous growth in popularity of machine learning, says Kaiming He, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who is an author on the most-cited paper of the twenty-first century, according to a Nature analysis published earlier this year. Of the top ten most cited papers this century, eight were on machine learning. "AI is changing the world, and we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg," Bengio tells Nature. Bengio's "track record is clearly outstanding", says Alberto Martín Martín, an information scientist at the University of Granada in Spain. But he adds that raw citation counts are "crude metrics" that some less-scrupulous researchers have learnt to manipulate, and he does not think that universities should use the rankings for marketing. Different bibliometric platforms -- such as Web of Science, Scopus and OpenAlex -- rank researchers in a different way to Google Scholar, and often result in lower overall numbers of citations, as the Nature analysis found. As well as in peer-reviewed journals, Google Scholar tracks citations in books and preprints posted anywhere on the Internet. Bengio says he is an "avid user" of Google Scholar, which celebrated two decades since its founding last year. "I think it has revolutionized science. It makes it so much easier to do things that would otherwise take painstaking efforts," he says. But he adds that he pays "as little as possible" attention to his own citation count. "It should not become an objective for researchers to have more citations, because it leads into trying to optimize this rather than do good science and go after the truth."

A.I. Pioneer Yoshua Bengio Becomes 1st Living Scientist With 1M Google Scholar Citations

Bengio's milestone underscores A.I.'s growing influence across science and technology research. 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. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters 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."