The world's most highly cited researcher, Turing Award winner Bengio has dominated the rankings with nearly one million citations. Hinton and He Kaiming have made it into the TOP 5.
The list of Highly Cited Researchers globally has been released! Yoshua Bengio has become the world's first "Most Highly Cited" scholar. Additionally, in the TOP 10 list, Hinton, He Kaiming, and Ilya Sutskever are all on the list.
The world's first scientist with the "highest citations across all fields" is actually Yoshua Bengio!
As one of the three giants of deep learning and a Turing Award winner, Bengio not only has the highest citations in the computer field but is also ranked first in the world.
On his Google Scholar profile, Bengio has refreshed the record with an astonishing total citation count of over 970,000.
As early as 2018, he won the laurels of computer researchers with the "highest daily citation count" and received the Turing Award in the same year as Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.
In the past five years, his personal citation count has reached as high as 698,008 times.
This statistical data from the AD Scientific Index in 2025 summarizes the performance and influence of all researchers and academic research globally.
These rankings select globally highly cited researchers based on the total citation count and the citation count in the past five years.
Next, let's take a detailed look at which other scientists are on the list besides Bengio, the most highly cited globally?
Among the global TOP 10 Highly Cited Researchers, computer experts occupy 4 spots
On the overall list, there are a total of 4 scientists in the computer field who have become the "legends" of global high citations.
Geoffrey Hinton
Ranked second globally is Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI and one of the three Turing Award giants.
Currently, his total citation count has reached 950,000, and the total citation count in the past five years is over 570,000.
Hinton's importance to deep neural networks is equivalent to that of the "modern pioneer".
In 2012, he led his students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever to develop the deep convolutional neural network model - AlexNet, which won the championship in the ImageNet Challenge.
He is also a key figure in the "backpropagation algorithm", which is widely used for the efficient training of multi - layer neural networks.
In 2023, after leaving Google due to remorse for his life's work, Hinton has been engaged in work related to AI risk and safety.
In 2024, he and John Hopfield jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics in recognition of their pioneering work in the field of machine learning.
He Kaiming
He Kaiming, the father of the deep residual network (ResNets), has become the fifth most highly cited scientist globally.
Currently, his total citation count is as high as 730,000, and the high citation count in the past five years is 610,000 in total.
Currently, he is a distinguished scientist at Google DeepMind and a tenured professor at MIT EECS.
As is well - known, He Kaiming's most well - known research is ResNets, whose influence is not limited to the field of computer vision, and its design concept is widely applied in modern deep learning models.
According to statistics in April by Nature, ResNets has become the most highly cited paper in the 21st century.
Whether it is the Transformer in natural language processing or AlphaGo Zero in reinforcement learning, the residual connection has become one of the core components of these models.
In addition to ResNets, the Faster R - CNN and Mask R - CNN proposed by He Kaiming have also promoted the development of object detection and image segmentation technologies.
Ilya Sutskever
After He Kaiming, the only highly cited scientist in the computer field in the global TOP 10 is Ilya Sutskever.
Currently, his personal total citation count is 670,000, and the citation count in the past five years is 500,000.
As mentioned before, during his doctoral studies at the University of Toronto, Ilya developed AlexNet with his tutor Hinton and dominated the 2012 ImageNet competition.
His most glorious moment was after he founded OpenAI with Altman and Greg Brockman in 2015.
During this period, Ilya led multiple AI projects and finally promoted the birth of ChatGPT with his team.
Until 2024, he officially announced his departure and founded his own company, SSI, focusing on the research of safe super - intelligence.
So far, without releasing a single product, he has secured huge financing with just a website, and the valuation exceeds $30 billion.
Other scientists on the global TOP 10 list also include Ahmedin Jemal, Eric Lander, Richard M Ryan, Gregory Lip, and John PA Ioannidis.
TOP 10 in the computer list
Further breaking it down to the global computer list TOP 10, besides the four big names just mentioned, many well - known scientists are also on the list.
They are Ross Girshick, the core author of R - CNN, Andrew Zisserman, a professor at the University of Oxford, Yann LeCun, the chief scientist at Meta, Ian Goodfellow, the father of GAN, Jeff Dean, the chief scientist at Google DeepMind, and Oriol Vinyals, a scientist at Google DeepMind.
Ranking basis
The AD Scientific Index was founded by Murat Alper and Cihan Döğer in 2021.
It is not only a comprehensive ranking system but also a decision - support platform that uses multi - dimensional, transparent, and verifiable data to evaluate the academic performance at the individual and institutional levels.
The latest list covers over 2.62 million scientists in 221 countries, and the evaluation indicators include the H - index, i10 - index, and total citation count.
Meanwhile, it takes into account both the long - term accumulation and recent activity of scientists.
Moreover, the ranking provides comparative analysis of 13 major subject areas and 221 sub - disciplines.
They said that the data analysis uses near - real - time indicators and focuses on screening for academic misconduct and manipulation.
How to rank scientists?
Specifically, the AD Scientific Index uses six key indicators within two different "time frames" to evaluate academic performance:
Time frame
Total (career): Reflects the cumulative academic influence throughout the entire career.
Recent (last 5 years): Reflects the academic output, research momentum, and institutional contributions in the last 5 years.
By analyzing these two dimensions, the index can present a balanced view of a scholar's long - term achievements and recent performance.
Core indicators
H - index (total and recent)
i10 - index (total and recent)
Citation count (total and recent)
Reference materials
https://www.adscientificindex.com/citation - ranking/
https://x.com/AISafetyMemes/status/1959262486995103785