Michel Foucault, the late French thinker and historian, lengthy held the excellence as the one researcher to surpass a couple of million citations on Google Scholar. These days, nonetheless, Foucault has firm: A.I. pioneer Yoshua Bengio.
Last month, Bengio turned the primary residing scientist to have his work cited a couple of million instances on Google Scholar. Citations to his analysis have surged in recent times, with greater than 730,000 recorded since 2020 and roughly 135,000 in 2024 alone.
Often dubbed one of many “Godfathers of A.I.,” Bengio’s work in deep studying helped lay the foundations for a lot of right this moment’s A.I. revolution. A founding father of the Mila-Quebec AI Institute and a professor of laptop science on the University of Montreal, Bengio recently launched LawZero, a nonprofit centered on creating safety-centered A.I. methods to help in scientific analysis.
“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,” stated Hugo Larochelle, who earlier this 12 months succeeded Bengio as scientific director of Mila, in a press release.
Bengio, alongside fellow A.I. researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, acquired the 2018 Turing Award—also known as the “Nobel Prize of Computing”— for his or her breakthroughs in neural networks. The trio additionally co-authored Bengio’s second most-cited paper. Hinton, who presently has practically 980,000 citations on Google Scholar, can also be on monitor to quickly be part of Bengio within the million-citation membership, based on Mila.
Researchers in fields like A.I., machine studying and most cancers analysis usually tend to accumulate excessive quotation counts attributable to widespread curiosity and fast publication cycles, stated Daniel Sage, a arithmetic professor on the University of Buffalo who research quotation metrics.
Top-cited students are inclined to work “in certain fields which have a lot of people working in them, and a lot of papers being produced,” he instructed Observer.
The rising fascination with A.I. has even boosted quotation counts of researchers outdoors the sector. For instance, Terence Tao, a famend mathematician and Fields medalist, has earned greater than 100,000 Google Scholar citations. Many of his top-cited papers, nonetheless, had been truly revealed in electrical engineering or laptop science journals, relatively than pure arithmetic, stated 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 usually reviews increased quotation counts than different information suppliers akin to Web of Science attributable to its broader indexing standards.
That stated, reaching a million citations stays a exceptional achievement. “It’s still incredibly impressive,” stated 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.”