Yoshua Bengio is the first living scientist to have 1 million Google Scholar citations

The late French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault has long been hailed as the only researcher to be cited more than a million times on Google Scholar. Now, however, Foucault has a companion: artificial intelligence pioneer Yoshua Bengio.

Last month, Bengio became the first living scientist to have his work cited more than 1 million times on Google Scholar. Citations for his research have surged in recent years, with more than 730,000 citations since 2020 and about 135,000 citations in 2024 alone.

Bengio is often referred to as one of the “Godfathers of Artificial Intelligence,” and his work on deep learning laid the foundation for today’s AI revolution. Bengio, founder of the Mira-Québec Institute for Artificial Intelligence and a professor of computer science at the University of Montreal, recently launched LawZero, a non-profit focused on developing safety-focused AI systems to assist scientific research.

Hugo Larochelle, who succeeded Bengio as Mila’s scientific director earlier this year, said in a statement: “Google Scholar’s citation count reflects the broad impact of Professor Bengio’s research in deep learning, which has laid the foundation for countless other scientific and technological advances around the world.”

Bengio, along with fellow artificial intelligence researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, received the 2018 Turing Award—often called the “Nobel Prize of computing”—for their breakthroughs in neural networks. The three also co-authored Bengio’s second most cited paper. Mila said Hinton currently has nearly 980,000 citations on Google Scholar, and he is expected to soon join Bengio in the million-citation club.

Daniel Sage, a professor of mathematics at the University at Buffalo who studies citation metrics, said researchers in fields such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and cancer research are more likely to accumulate high citations due to broad interest and fast publication cycles.

He told the Observer that the most cited academics tend to “work in areas where a lot of people are working and have published a lot of papers”.

Growing interest in artificial intelligence has even increased citations from researchers outside the field. For example, the famous mathematician and Fields Medal winner Terence Tao has received more than 100,000 Google Scholar citations. However, many of his most cited papers were actually published in electrical engineering or computer science journals rather than pure mathematics journals, Sage said.

“If you try to compare people in AI to people in every other field, it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison,” he added, noting that Google Scholar typically reports higher citation counts than other data providers, such as Web of Science, due to its broader indexing criteria.

Still, reaching 1 million citations is a remarkable achievement. “It’s still impressive,” Sage said. “One has to take this kind of thing with a grain of salt, but it shows both the popularity of the field and the quality of the work in it.”