‘Godfather of AI’ Breaks Major Science Research Record

By Davide Castelvecchi & Nature magazine

Computer scientist Yoshua Bengio has become the first person to have their work cited more than one million times on the search engine Google Scholar.

Bengio, who is based at the University of Montreal in Canada, is known for his pioneering research on machine learning. He has been called one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence (AI), alongside computer scientists Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto in Canada and Yann LeCun at the technology company Meta in New York City. The trio shared the A. M. Turing Award — the most prestigious prize in computer science — in 2019 for work on neural networks.

Bengio’s top-cited papers include one he co-authored in 2014 titled Generative Adversarial Nets, which has more than 105,000 Google Scholar citations, as well as a Nature review paper he wrote with LeCun and Hinton. The list also includes papers on ‘attention’, a technique that helps machines to analyse text. Attention became one of the crucial innovations that fuelled the chatbot revolution, starting with ChatGPT in 2022.

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The “remarkable” achievement highlights the tremendous growth in popularity of machine learning, says Kaiming He, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who is an author on the most-cited paper of the twenty-first century, according to a Nature analysis published earlier this year. Of the top ten most cited papers this century, eight were on machine learning.

“AI is changing the world, and we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg,” Bengio tells Nature.

Outstanding track record

Bengio’s “track record is clearly outstanding”, says Alberto Martín Martín, an information scientist at the University of Granada in Spain. But he adds that raw citation counts are “crude metrics” that some less-scrupulous researchers have learnt to manipulate, and he does not think that universities should use the rankings for marketing.

Different bibliometric platforms — such as Web of Science, Scopus and OpenAlex — rank researchers in a different way to Google Scholar, and often result in lower overall numbers of citations, as the Nature analysis found. As well as in 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, which celebrated two decades since its founding last year. “I think it has revolutionized science. It makes it so much easier to do things that would otherwise take painstaking efforts,” he says.

But he adds that he pays “as little as possible” attention to his own citation count. “It should not become an objective for researchers to have more citations, because it leads into trying to optimize this rather than do good science and go after the truth.”

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on November 12, 2025.

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