Michel Foucault, the late French philosopher and historian, has long held the distinction of being the only researcher to exceed more than a million citations on Google Scholar. These days, however, Foucault has company: AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio.
Last month, Bengio became the first living scientist to have his work cited more than one million times on Google Scholar. Estimates of his research have already increased in recent years, with more than 730,000 recorded as of 2020 and about 135,000 in 2024 alone.
Often referred to as “the other person in Ai,” Bengi’s work in deep learning helped lay many of the foundations of today’s AI Revolution. The founder of the Mila-Quebec AI Institute and a professor of computer science at the University of Montreal, Bengio has recently launched Lawzero, a non-profit making AI systems focused on security to aid in scientific research.
“This number of Google Scratar citations shows the great impact of Professor Bengio’s research on deep learning, which serves as the basis for many other aspects of science around the world,” said Hugo Larocecelle, who last year succeeded Bengio as Mila’s scientific director, in a statement.
Bengio, along with AI researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yann Lecun, received the 2018 Transport prize – often called the “nobel prize of computing” – for their achievements in neural networks. The trio also authored Bengio’s second most cited paper. Hinton, who previously had nearly 980,000 complaints on Google Scratlar, is also on his way to quickly joining Bengio in the millionaire club, according to Mila.
Researchers in fields such as AI, Machine Learning and cancer research are likely to accumulate higher counts due to wider interest and faster publication cycles, says Professor of Statistics at the University of Buffalo metrics.
Top-rated scholars tend to work “in fields that have a lot of people working on them, and a lot of papers are being produced,” he told the insider.
The growing interest in AI has even increased the number of researchers outside the field. For example, Trence Tao, a famous mathematician and Medalist field, received more than 100,000 citations. His top-ranked papers, however, were actually published in an electronic magazine or a computer science magazine, rather than pure mathematics, Sage said.
“It is compared to apples and oranges when you try to compare people in AI vs. People in various other fields,” he added, noting that Google’s providers are often reported to be high on science that is similar to a broad science policy because of its extensive process.
That said, reaching one million citations is still an amazing achievement. “It’s pretty impressive,” Sage said. “One has to take these kinds of things with a grain of salt, but it is a sign of the temperature of the field and the quality of work within the field.”