Data guide· 1 min read
The most-cited scientists in the world (2026 list)
Douglas G. Altman is the most-cited scientist in the world, with 1,101,958 citations, followed by David Moher and M. Shoji.
Updated automatically every day. Data: 29 fully counted days, September 26, 2026 – October 24, 2026. Source: OpenAlex and PubMed.
Top 30 most-cited scientists
| # | Scientist | Institution | Country | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Douglas G. Altman | — | — | 1,101,958 |
| 2 | David Moher | St. Michael's Hospital | Canada | 909,406 |
| 3 | M. Shoji | National Institutes of Natural Sciences | Japan | 806,393 |
| 4 | Ahmedin Jemal | American Cancer Society | United States | 742,047 |
| 5 | Eric S. Lander | Broad Institute | United States | 668,036 |
| 6 | Kaiming He | Google DeepMind (United Kingdom) | United Kingdom | 591,105 |
| 7 | Yoshua Bengio | — | — | 577,836 |
| 8 | Christopher J L Murray | University of Washington | United States | 572,865 |
| 9 | Rebecca L. Siegel | American Cancer Society | United States | 565,687 |
| 10 | Freddie Bray | World Health Organization | Switzerland | 536,806 |
| 11 | Geoffrey E. Hinton | Microsoft (United States) | United States | 530,050 |
| 12 | Victor Aboyans | — | — | 500,779 |
| 13 | Jennifer Tetzlaff | — | — | 498,036 |
| 14 | Zhong Lin Wang | Georgia Institute of Technology | United States | 491,006 |
| 15 | Walter Churchill Willett | Brigham and Women's Hospital | United States | 479,658 |
| 16 | Jacques Ferlay | Centre international de recherche sur le cancer | France | 474,419 |
| 17 | Theo Vos | University of Washington | United States | 471,101 |
| 18 | Michaël Grätzel | — | — | 466,700 |
| 19 | Stacey Gabriel | — | — | 465,884 |
| 20 | Gregory Y.H. Lip | — | — | 463,177 |
How are citations counted?
A citation is one paper referring to another. Each scientist's total adds up the citations of all their papers in OpenAlex. Authors of widely used methods, statistics and reporting guidelines lead the list. Name matching is automatic, so a few totals may combine or split people with similar names.
See who is gaining citations today on the scientists page.