Partial list of researchers with more than 100,000 citations on Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a valuable bibliographic resource, and is often used for ranking researchers, institutions or journals, based on the number of publications, of citations, or the h-index. However, these numbers are not always easy to interpret, and especially to compare from a domain to another. This list starts as an attempt to answer the questions: who are the most cited researchers (with a Scholar page) on a given topic, and how often are they cited?

Some quick methods do not seem to have 100% recall, but they could help to improve the list below:

See also The h Index for Computer Science, by Jens Palsberg.

This list was started in June 2015 (partially updated Sept. 2016) and has only a small sample of names, found mostly by searching over reasonable labels for fields. The list includes the domain labels they have listed. In principle, the list can only increase in time. Automating such a list would be the next thing to do (unless Scholar does it). Note that some researchers are deceased, some for a long time. Thanks to Scholar for creating pages for them.

  • Michel Foucault - 666k (history of ideas, epistemology, ethics, political, philosophy)
  • Pierre Bourdieu - 486k (sociology)
  • Sigmund Freud - 453k (Neurology, Psychology, Psychopathology)

  • Noam Chomsky - 299k (Linguistic Theory, Syntax, Semantics, Philosophy of Language)
  • Bert Vogelstein - 293k (cancer, biology) [h-index=226]
  • Herbert Simon - 279k (Artificial intelligence, Cognitive psychology, Bounded rationality)
  • Eric Lander - 278k (Biology, Genomics, Genetics, Bioinformatics, Mathematics) [h-index=220]
  • Ulrich K. Laemmli - 259k (biochemistry, molecular biology)
  • Daniel Kahneman - 255k (decision theory, behavioral economics, with A. Tversky)
  • Douglas G Altman - 252k (biostatistics, statistics)

  • Karl Marx - 241k (Economics History Marxism Philosophy Sociology)
  • Oliver H. Lowry - 228k (biochemistry)
  • Robert Tibshirani - 227k (statistics)
  • Amos Tversky - 212k (decision theory, behavioral economics, with D. Kahneman)
  • Max Weber - 214k (sociology, economics, history, law, politics)
  • Jacques Derrida - 207k (philosophy deconstruction)
  • Robert Langer - 205k (drug delivery tissue engineering biomaterials nanotechnology chemistry)
  • Erving Goffman - 202k (sociology, symbolic interaction)

  • Kenneth Kinzler - 193k (cancer, genetics, genomics)
  • Michael Graetzel - estimated at above 181k (chemistry, solar cells)
  • Donald B Rubin - 198k (Statistics, Economics, Psychology, Biostatistics, Epidemiology)
  • Edward Witten - 175k (String theory M-theory Quantum gravity Quantum field theory Supersymmetry)
  • Robert A. Weinberg - 176k (Cancer Biology Cell Biology Genetics)
  • Vladimir Vapnik - 171k (machine learning, statistics, computer science)
  • Matthias Mann - 166k (Proteomics, Systems biology, Metabolic diseases, Cancer, Signal Transduction)
  • Lotfi A. Zadeh - 147k (Fuzzy Logic, Soft Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Human-Level Machine Intelligence)
  • Karl Friston - 140k (Neuroscience)
  • Edward L. Deci - 134k (motivation, self-determination theory, psychology)
  • Yiguo Zhang - 142k (cell biology gene regulation transcription factors live-cell imaging)
  • Guido Kroemer - 130k (apoptosis cancer research cell biology molecular biology immunology)
  • Alan Baddeley - 129k (Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Memory, Working memory)
  • Anil K. Jain - 126k (Biometrics, Computer vision, Pattern recognition, Machine learning, Image processing)
  • Richard Frackowiak - 122k ("Human brain structure and function")
  • Trevor Hastie - 110k (Statistical learning and modeling, data mining, machine learning)
  • Geoffrey Hinton - 108k (machine learning, neural networks, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, object recognition)
  • George Lakoff - 110k (Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Politics, Law Psychology)
  • Robert Merton - 108k (sociology, anomie, criminology)
  • Émile Durkheim - 106k sociology philosophy anthropology religion)
  • Theodor Adorno - 105k (sociology)
  • Talcott Parsons - 103k (sociology)
  • John Rawls - 115k (philosophy political philosophy justice)
  • Mark P. Mattson - 105k (Neuroscience, aging, Alzheimer's disease)
  • George P. Chrousos (biochemistry) - 103k