NSL-KDD / KDD Cup 99

data category: Cybersecurity and anomaly detection benchmarks · 0 papers in the last 7 days

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Network traffic, intrusion, fraud and anomaly records used to compare detection methods.

Names searched for: NSL-KDD, KDD Cup 99, KDD99, KDDCup99, KDD Cup 1999

Key findings#

From Nov 2023 to Oct 2026, 122 archived papers mentioned NSL-KDD / KDD Cup 99 in their title, abstract or keywords (the search of earlier months' full texts is still under way), most of them in Jan 2025 (10).
NSL-KDD / KDD Cup 99 was mentioned in 1 paper in the last 30 days (2026-10-06 to 2026-11-04), ranking #172 of the 255 datasets mentioned.
By journal category: Information Systems (1).
Most of them appeared in Computers & Security (1).
From 2017 to 2026 (so far), NSL-KDD / KDD Cup 99 was mentioned in 231 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (179), information systems (43) and statistics (3).
52 of them were published in 2025, against 12 in 2017.
Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation (4), Deakin University (3) and Manipal Academy of Higher Education (3).
The journals publishing most of them were Computers & Security (24), Neural Computing and Applications (18) and Expert Systems with Applications (18).
The most-cited of them is “A bidirectional LSTM deep learning approach for intrusion detection” (Expert Systems with Applications, 2021), with 438 citations.
Papers use NSL-KDD / KDD Cup 99 most often with UNSW-NB15 (99), CIC-IDS2017 / CSE-CIC-IDS2018 (65) and IoT intrusion data (Bot-IoT, TON_IoT, CICIoT2023) (36); it has 10 partners in the code and data network, in the group around NSL-KDD / KDD Cup 99, UNSW-NB15, CIC-IDS2017 /….

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
	46	50	26	122

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	11	2	11	9	15	18	17	35	43	18
Information Systems	1	2	4	1	4	6	7	9	8	1
Statistics	0	1	0	0	0	0	1	0	1	0
Operations Research	0	0	0	0	1	0	2	0	0	0
Higher Education and Research	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	1	0	0
Management	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1
All categories	12	5	15	10	20	24	28	45	52	20

Where the papers come from#

Journals with the most papers, since 2023
#	Journal	Papers
1	Computers & Security	24
2	Neural Computing and Applications	18
3	Expert Systems with Applications	18
4	Artificial Intelligence Review	17
5	Journal Of Big Data	16
6	Knowledge-Based Systems	9
7	Knowledge and Information Systems	6
8	Machine Learning	5
9	Information Sciences	4
10	Cognitive Computation	4

Institutions with the most papers, since 2023
#	Institution	Papers
1	Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation	4
2	Deakin University	3
3	Manipal Academy of Higher Education	3
4	SRM Institute of Science and Technology	3
5	University of Bari Aldo Moro	3
6	Ajman University	2
7	Assiut University	2
8	City University of Hong Kong	2
9	Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale per l'Informatica	2
10	Edith Cowan University	2

Countries with the most papers, since 2023
#	Country	Papers
1	China	29
2	India	23
3	United Kingdom	14
4	United States	14
5	Australia	12
6	Egypt	12
7	Italy	10
8	United Arab Emirates	8
9	Spain	7
10	Saudi Arabia	7

Keywords with the most papers, since 2023
#	Keyword	Papers
1	NSL-KDD dataset	58
2	intrusion detection	41
3	network intrusion detection	32
4	feature selection	30
5	UNSW-NB15	26
6	class imbalance	26
7	Internet of Things security	23
8	intrusion detection systems	22
9	network traffic classification	21
10	anomaly detection	20

Most-cited papers#

Most-cited papers since 2017
#	Citations	Per month	Title	Journal	Published	Authors
1	438	6.9	A bidirectional LSTM deep learning approach for intrusion detection	Expert Systems with Applications	2021-07-16	Yakubu Imrana, Yanping Xiang, Liaqat Ali et al.
2	399	4.9	A feature selection algorithm for intrusion detection system based on Pigeon Inspired Optimizer	Expert Systems with Applications	2020-01-25	Hadeel Alazzam, Ahmad Sharieh, Khair Eddin Sabri
3	355	5.5	A survey on intrusion detection system: feature selection, model, performance measures, application perspective, challenges, and future research directions	Artificial Intelligence Review	2021-07-01	Ankit Thakkar, Ritika Lohiya
4	346	4.0	Application of deep reinforcement learning to intrusion detection for supervised problems	Expert Systems with Applications	2019-09-18	Manuel López‐Martín, Belén Carro, Antonio Sánchez-Esguevillas
5	315	9.7	Machine learning-based network intrusion detection for big and imbalanced data using oversampling, stacking feature embedding and feature extraction	Journal Of Big Data	2024-02-22	Md. Alamin Talukder, Md. Manowarul Islam, Md. Ashraf Uddin 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 NSL-KDD / KDD Cup 99 most often with UNSW-NB15 (99), CIC-IDS2017 / CSE-CIC-IDS2018 (65) and IoT intrusion data (Bot-IoT, TON_IoT, CICIoT2023) (36); it has 10 partners in the code and data network, in the group around NSL-KDD / KDD Cup 99, UNSW-NB15, CIC-IDS2017 /…. The whole network →

What papers use NSL-KDD / KDD Cup 99 together with (at least 3 papers; lift 1 = chance)
Used with	Type	Papers using both	Lift
UNSW-NB15	Dataset	99	128.4
CIC-IDS2017 / CSE-CIC-IDS2018	Dataset	65	95.1
IoT intrusion data (Bot-IoT, TON_IoT, CICIoT2023)	Dataset	36	72.8
UCI Machine Learning Repository	Dataset	14	4.6
CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100	Dataset	13	1.9
Kaggle	Dataset	10	3.6
MNIST / Fashion-MNIST	Dataset	10	1.9
ImageNet	Dataset	6	0.5
CEC benchmark functions	Dataset	5	1.6
MODIS	Dataset	4	2.0

Papers mentioning NSL-KDD / KDD Cup 99 in the last 30 days, newest first.
Date	Title	Journal	Authors	Affiliations
2026-10-24	How evaluation protocol choices inflate intrusion detection accuracy: A three-dataset systematic study	Computers & Security	Mohammed BERHILI, Omar Chaieb, Mohammed Benabdellah	Mohamed I University

Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). NSL-KDD / KDD Cup 99. Journal and Conference Research Rankings. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/datasets/nsl-kdd-kdd-cup-99

@misc{scholar4ai-datasets-nsl-kdd-kdd-cup-99,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {NSL-KDD / KDD Cup 99},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/datasets/nsl-kdd-kdd-cup-99}},
  urldate = {2026-11-04},
  note = {Journal and Conference Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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