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. Nowadays, nonetheless, Foucault has firm: A.I. pioneer Yoshua Bengio.
Final month, Bengio turned the primary dwelling 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.
Usually dubbed one of many “Godfathers of A.I.,” Bengio’s work in deep studying helped lay the foundations for a lot of right now’s A.I. revolution. A founding father of the Mila-Quebec AI Institute and a professor of pc science on the College of Montreal, Bengio just lately launched LawZero, a nonprofit centered on creating safety-centered A.I. techniques to help in scientific analysis.
“This Google Scholar quotation rely displays the intensive impression of Professor Bengio’s analysis in deep studying, which serves as a basis for numerous different scientific and technological developments worldwide,” stated Hugo Larochelle, who earlier this yr succeeded Bengio as scientific director of Mila, in an announcement.
Bengio, alongside fellow A.I. researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, acquired the 2018 Turing Award—sometimes called 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 almost 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 speedy publication cycles, stated Daniel Sage, a arithmetic professor on the College of Buffalo who research quotation metrics.
High-cited students are inclined to work “in sure fields which have lots of people working in them, and numerous papers being produced,” he instructed Observer.
The rising fascination with A.I. has even boosted quotation counts of researchers exterior the sphere. For instance, Terence Tao, a famend mathematician and Fields medalist, has earned greater than 100,000 Google Scholar citations. Lots of his top-cited papers, nonetheless, had been really printed in electrical engineering or pc science journals, quite than pure arithmetic, stated Sage.
“It’s apples and oranges comparisons when you attempt to evaluate individuals in A.I. vs. individuals in numerous different fields,” he added, noting that Google Scholar usually stories increased quotation counts than different information suppliers comparable to Internet of Science attributable to its broader indexing standards.
That stated, reaching a million citations stays a exceptional achievement. “It’s nonetheless extremely spectacular,” stated Sage. “One has to take these sorts of issues with a grain of salt, however it’s a signal each of the hotness of the sphere and the standard of the work inside the discipline.”
