MS COCO

data category: Object detection and segmentation benchmarks · 1 paper in the last 7 days

← Most-used data · All Object detection and segmentation benchmarks datasets

Images labelled with object boxes or pixel masks, including driving scenes.

Names searched for: MS COCO, MS-COCO, Microsoft COCO, COCO dataset, COCO benchmark, Common Objects in Context, COCO

Key findings#

From Nov 2023 to Oct 2026, 625 archived papers mentioned MS COCO in their title, abstract or keywords (the search of earlier months' full texts is still under way), most of them in Aug 2024 (34).
MS COCO was mentioned in 11 papers in the last 30 days (2026-10-06 to 2026-11-04), ranking #19 of the 255 datasets mentioned.
By journal category: AI (11).
Most of them appeared in International Journal of Computer Vision (3), Artificial Intelligence Review (2) and Information Processing & Management (2).
From 2017 to 2026 (so far), MS COCO was mentioned in 850 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (831), finance (9) and information systems (4).
203 of them were published in 2025, against 12 in 2017.
Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (58), University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (42) and Zhejiang University (35).
The journals publishing most of them were IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (186), International Journal of Computer Vision (102) and IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (64).
The most-cited of them is “Mask R-CNN” (IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2018), with 3,459 citations.
Papers use MS COCO most often with ImageNet (356), PASCAL VOC (174) and CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100 (114); it has 56 partners in the code and data network, in the group around ImageNet, CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100, MNIST / Fashion-MNIST.

Mentions over 36 months#

Papers mentioning it by publication month, Nov 2023 to Oct 2026 (titles, abstracts and keywords; the full texts of earlier months are still being searched)
Trend	Nov 23–Oct 24	Nov 24–Oct 25	Nov 25–Oct 26	36 months
	253	217	155	625

Papers per year#

20172026 (so far)

Papers per publication year and category
Category	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025	2026 (so far)
AI	10	10	16	27	39	46	112	240	197	134
Finance	1	1	1	2	1	1	1	0	1	0
Information Systems	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	2	1	1
Operations Research	0	0	0	0	0	1	0	0	2	0
Tourism and Hospitality	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	0
Management	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	0
Economics	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
All categories	12	11	17	29	40	48	113	242	203	135

Where the papers come from#

Journals with the most papers, since 2023
#	Journal	Papers
1	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	186
2	International Journal of Computer Vision	102
3	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	64
4	Pattern Recognition	58
5	Artificial Intelligence Review	42
6	Neural Computing and Applications	39
7	Knowledge-Based Systems	33
8	Expert Systems with Applications	32
9	Neural Networks	23
10	Information Fusion	19

Institutions with the most papers, since 2023
#	Institution	Papers
1	Chinese Academy of Sciences	58
2	University of Chinese Academy of Sciences	42
3	Zhejiang University	35
4	Nanyang Technological University	31
5	Tsinghua University	27
6	Shanghai Jiao Tong University	26
7	Institute of Automation	23
8	Peking University	23
9	Sun Yat-sen University	23
10	Hong Kong University of Science and Technology	21

Countries with the most papers, since 2023
#	Country	Papers
1	China	422
2	United States	98
3	Hong Kong	75
4	Australia	73
5	United Kingdom	62
6	Singapore	56
7	Italy	30
8	Germany	23
9	Spain	22
10	South Korea	20

Keywords with the most papers, since 2023
#	Keyword	Papers
1	object detection	110
2	image classification	50
3	semantic segmentation	50
4	vision transformer	43
5	MS COCO	36
6	vision-language models	36
7	CLIP	27
8	image captioning	27
9	instance segmentation	27
10	knowledge distillation	24

Most-cited papers#

Most-cited papers since 2017
#	Citations	Per month	Title	Journal	Published	Authors
1	3,459	34.3	Mask R-CNN	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2018-06-05	Kaiming He, Georgia Gkioxari, Piotr Dollár et al.
2	1,961	23.6	Cascade R-CNN: High Quality Object Detection and Instance Segmentation	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2019-11-28	Zhaowei Cai, Nuno M. Vasconcelos
3	1,187	37.8	A review of convolutional neural networks in computer vision	Artificial Intelligence Review	2024-03-23	Xia Zhao, Limin Wang, Yufei Zhang et al.
4	998	30.9	Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2024-02-26	Jingyi Zhang, Jiaxing Huang, Sheng Jin et al.
5	769	16.2	AlphaPose: Whole-Body Regional Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking in Real-Time	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2022-11-17	Hao-Shu Fang, Jiefeng Li, Hongyang Tang et al.

Archive counts by publication year: a paper counts when its title, abstract or keywords name the dataset, or when OpenAlex's full-text search finds it there (searched for the last 30 days' papers and, by a pass over the past years, for older ones). Names added to the list later are looked for in older papers as the archive is read again.

Used together with#

Papers use MS COCO most often with ImageNet (356), PASCAL VOC (174) and CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100 (114); it has 56 partners in the code and data network, in the group around ImageNet, CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100, MNIST / Fashion-MNIST. The whole network →

What papers use MS COCO together with (at least 3 papers; lift 1 = chance)
Used with	Type	Papers using both	Lift
ImageNet	Dataset	356	7.6
PASCAL VOC	Dataset	174	27.4
CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100	Dataset	114	4.3
Cityscapes	Dataset	75	12.8
ADE20K	Dataset	70	24.8
KITTI	Dataset	50	6.2
YouTube / TikTok	Dataset	48	1.4
Fine-grained benchmarks (CUB-200, Stanford Cars, Oxford Flowers)	Dataset	41	9.2
MNIST / Fashion-MNIST	Dataset	37	1.7
Action recognition (Kinetics, UCF101, HMDB51)	Dataset	34	6.3
Open Images	Dataset	30	29.4
Hugging Face Hub	Dataset	27	2.9

Papers mentioning MS COCO in the last 30 days, newest first.
Date	Title	Journal	Authors	Affiliations
2026-10-30	Narrative theory-driven LLM methods for automatic story generation and understanding: a survey	Artificial Intelligence Review	David Y. Liu, Aditya Joshi, Paul A. Dawson	UNSW Sydney
2026-10-26	TokLIP: Marry Visual Tokens to CLIP for Multimodal Comprehension and Generation	International Journal of Computer Vision	Haokun Lin, Teng Wang, Yixiao Ge et al.	City University of Hong Kong; Chinese Academy of Sciences; Tencent (China); …
2026-10-26	Inst-Inpaint: Instructing to Remove Objects with Diffusion Models	International Journal of Computer Vision	Ahmet Burak Yildirim, Vedat Baday, Erkut Erdem et al.	Bilkent University; Hacettepe University; Koç University
2026-10-22	Beyond the survey: a systematic empirical study of detection and association in visual MOT	Artificial Intelligence Review	Linh Van Ma, Juhua Hu, Wei Cheng et al.	Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology; University of Washington Tacoma
2026-10-20	Weighted UnLearning from Experience for Improved Spurious Correlation Robustness	Machine Learning	Jeff Mitchell, Jesus Martinez-del-Rincon, Niall McLaughlin	Queen's University Belfast
2026-10-19	Evidence-grounded multimodal knowledge graph for Dunhuang mural description generation	Expert Systems with Applications	Zhigang Xu, Chen Zhao	Lanzhou University of Technology
2026-10-17	CorrCLIPv2: Harnessing Unlabeled Images for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation	International Journal of Computer Vision	D H Zhang, Fagui Liu, Quan Tang et al.	South China University of Technology; Peng Cheng Laboratory
2026-10-17	Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Human–Object Interaction	Image and Vision Computing	Oriol Rabasseda, Zenjie Li, Kamal Nasrollahi et al.	Universitat de Barcelona; Aalborg University
2026-10-15	VLGRA: Visual-Language Semantic Optimization and Graph Reasoning for cross-modal retrieval	Information Processing & Management	Shiyuan Yang, Zhixin Li, 尤忠祥 et al.	Guangxi Normal University
2026-10-12	Beyond pairwise alignment: Hypergraph-based semantic calibration for image-text matching	Information Processing & Management	Jin Chen, Xiang Shen, Dezhi Han et al.	Shanghai Maritime University; The University of Sydney; Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation; …
2026-10-12	P2L-CA: An effective parameter tuning framework for rehearsal-free Multi-Label Class-Incremental Learning	Pattern Recognition	Songlin Dong, Jiangyang Li, Chenhao Ding et al.	Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology; Xi'an Jiaotong University

Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). MS COCO. Journal and Conference Research Rankings. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/datasets/ms-coco

@misc{scholar4ai-datasets-ms-coco,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {MS COCO},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/datasets/ms-coco}},
  urldate = {2026-11-04},
  note = {Journal and Conference Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

Free to reuse for non-commercial purposes with attribution (CC BY-NC 4.0).