November 13, 2025
2 minute read
The Godfather of Artificial Intelligence breaks the record for major scientific research
This event made machine learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio the most cited researcher on Google Scholar.
computer scientist Joshua Bengio became the first person whose work was cited more than a million times in the Google Scholar search engine.
Bengio, who works at the University of Montreal in Canada, is known for his pioneering research in machine learning. He is called one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence (AI), along with computer scientists Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto in Canada and Yann LeCun of the technology company Meta in New York. Trio shared the A. M. Turing Award – the most prestigious award in the field of computer science – 2019 for work in the field of neural networks.
Among Bengio's most cited papers is the paper he co-authored in 2014, “Generative Adversarial Networks,” which has over 105,000 citations on Google Scholar, and Nature review article he wrote with LeCun and Hinton. The list also includes articles on “attention,” a technique that helps machines analyze text. Attention became one of the most important innovations that contributed to the development chatbot revolutionstarting with ChatGPT in 2022.
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The “remarkable” achievement underscores the enormous rise in popularity of machine learning, says Kaiming He, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and author of the most cited paper of the 21st century, according to Nature analysis published earlier this year. Of the ten most cited papers this century, eight were on machine learning.
“AI is changing the world, and we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg,” says Bengio. Nature.
Outstanding track record
“Bengio’s track record is clearly outstanding,” says Alberto Martin Martin, a computer scientist at the University of Granada in Spain. But he adds that raw citation counts are “crude metrics” that some less scrupulous researchers have learned to manipulate, and he doesn't think universities should use rankings for marketing purposes.
Various bibliometric platforms such as Web of Science, Scopus and OpenAlex evaluate researchers differently than Google Scholar and often result in lower overall citation counts because Nature analysis found. In addition to 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 who last year celebrated two decades since its founding. “I think it's revolutionized science. It's now much easier to do things that would otherwise require painstaking effort,” he says.
But he adds that he pays “as little attention as possible” to his own citation count. “Increasing citations should not be a goal for researchers because that leads to trying to optimize it rather than doing good science and pursuing the truth.”
This article is reproduced with permission and has been first published November 12, 2025
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