Four papers authored by U of T scholars among the 25 most cited of the 21st century: Nature
The 2012 “AlexNet” paper by, from left to right, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky, helped launch the deep learning revolution and was ranked eighth on Nature’s list (photo by Johnny Guatto)
Published: July 9, 2025
Faculty of Arts & Science
Four of the 25 most-cited scientific papers of the 21st century were authored or co-authored by University of Toronto scholars, according to an analysis by the leading journal Nature.
The Nature ranking measured academic citations across five major databases, covering tens of millions of papers published since 2000.
Artificial intelligence emerged as one of the most prominent subject areas among the top-cited papers – so it’s no surprise that Geoffrey Hinton, University Professor emeritus of computer science and Nobel Prize winner appears twice on the list. Hinton is widely recognized as the “godfather of AI.”
Among the seminal AI-related works on the list was the 2012 “AlexNet” paper, ranked eighth overall. Officially titled “ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks,” the paper demonstrated the power of multi-layered artificial neural networks and helped launch the deep learning revolution. In addition to Hinton, it was co-authored by Alex Krizhevsky, a master’s graduate in computer science, and Ilya Sutskever, a PhD alum who recently received an honorary doctorate from U of T.
Another highly cited paper, ranked 16th, was the 2015 review paper on deep learning, co-authored by Hinton and his fellow 2018 A.M. Turing Award recipients. Published in Nature, the simply titled “Deep Learning” paper provided a comprehensive overview of the field and has become a foundational reference for AI researchers and practitioners.
Ranked seventh was the 2017 paper “Attention is all you need,” co-authored by Aidan Gomez¸ a U of T alum, former intern of Hinton’s at Google Brain and co-founder of the AI language processing startup Cohere. The paper introduced the transformer model, which underpins modern large language models – including the one powering ChatGPT.
The fourth U of T-linked paper on the list was the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) 2020 statement, which updated global guidelines for reporting systematic reviews. Co-authors included Andrea Tricco, executive director of the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at St. Michael’s Hospital, Unity Health Toronto, and associate professor at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health; and Larissa Shamseer, post-doctoral researcher at St. Michael’s Hospital’s Knowledge Translation Program. The paper is credited with significantly shaping global health research standards.
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