---
title: "Attention mechanism research: papers and trends"
description: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “attention mechanism” appeared in 2,431 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (2,266), operations research (82) and information systems (26)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/attention-mechanism
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/attention-mechanism.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “attention mechanism” appeared in 2,431 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (2,266), operations research (82) and information systems (26). (as of 2026-11-03)"
data_url: https://scholar4ai.com/data/rankings.json
updated: 2026-11-03T18:03:37+09:00
window: 2026-10-05 to 2026-11-03
source: OpenAlex (CC0)
---

# Papers on “attention mechanism”

Research on “attention mechanism” in the 480 tracked journals: papers per year and category, the journals, institutions and countries publishing it, the keywords studied with it and its most-cited papers. It is not among the most frequent keywords of the last 30 days, so this page has no list of its latest papers.

Back to the ranking: https://scholar4ai.com/rankings/keywords.md

## Key findings

- From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “attention mechanism” appeared in 2,431 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (2,266), operations research (82) and information systems (26).
- 495 of them were published in 2025, against 3 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (64), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (43) and Xi'an Jiaotong University (34).
- The journals publishing most of them were Expert Systems with Applications (417), Knowledge-Based Systems (190) and Neural Computing and Applications (141).
- The most-cited of them is “A survey of the recent architectures of deep convolutional neural networks” (Artificial Intelligence Review, 2020), with 3,135 citations.

## Papers per year

*Papers per publication year and category*

| Category | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 (so far) |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 3 | 25 | 56 | 122 | 209 | 307 | 369 | 418 | 460 | 297 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 10 | 16 | 11 | 21 | 14 |
| [Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/information-systems.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 0 | 7 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 1 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 5 | 3 | 9 |
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 5 | 5 | 3 |
| [Tourism and Hospitality](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/tourism-and-hospitality.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| [Higher Education and Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/higher-education-and-research.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| [Statistics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/statistics.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| [Marketing](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/marketing.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| All categories | 3 | 26 | 58 | 130 | 218 | 325 | 397 | 451 | 495 | 328 |

## Where the papers come from

*Journals with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 417 |
| 2 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 190 |
| 3 | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 141 |
| 4 | [Applied Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-intelligence.md) | 132 |
| 5 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 120 |
| 6 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 106 |
| 7 | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 67 |
| 8 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 60 |
| 9 | [Information Processing & Management](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-processing-management.md) | 44 |
| 10 | [IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-artificial-intelligence.md) | 37 |

*Institutions with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 64 |
| 2 | [University of Electronic Science and Technology of China](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-electronic-science-and-technology-of-china.md) | 43 |
| 3 | [Xi'an Jiaotong University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/xi-an-jiaotong-university.md) | 34 |
| 4 | [Northwestern Polytechnical University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/northwestern-polytechnical-university.md) | 33 |
| 5 | [Southeast University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/southeast-university.md) | 31 |
| 6 | [Shanghai Jiao Tong University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/shanghai-jiao-tong-university.md) | 30 |
| 7 | [Sichuan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/sichuan-university.md) | 30 |
| 8 | [Sun Yat-sen University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/sun-yat-sen-university.md) | 30 |
| 9 | [Northeastern University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/northeastern-university.md) | 29 |
| 10 | [Xidian University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/xidian-university.md) | 29 |

*Countries with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 1,253 |
| 2 | India | 130 |
| 3 | United States | 121 |
| 4 | United Kingdom | 102 |
| 5 | Hong Kong | 70 |
| 6 | Australia | 63 |
| 7 | South Korea | 48 |
| 8 | Singapore | 31 |
| 9 | Canada | 30 |
| 10 | Saudi Arabia | 26 |

*Keywords with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [graph convolutional networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/graph-convolutional-networks.md) | 93 |
| 2 | [graph neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/graph-neural-networks.md) | 86 |
| 3 | [transformer models](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/transformer-models.md) | 84 |
| 4 | [multimodal fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/multimodal-fusion.md) | 61 |
| 5 | [feature fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/feature-fusion.md) | 59 |
| 6 | [interpretability](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/interpretability.md) | 56 |
| 7 | [convolutional neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/convolutional-neural-networks.md) | 55 |
| 8 | [class imbalance](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/class-imbalance.md) | 49 |
| 9 | [multi-scale feature fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/multi-scale-feature-fusion.md) | 47 |

## Most-cited papers

*Most-cited papers since 2017*

| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3,135 | 40.0 | [A survey of the recent architectures of deep convolutional neural networks](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-020-09825-6) | [Artificial Intelligence Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/artificial-intelligence-review.md) | 2020-04-21 | Asifullah Khan, Anabia Sohail, Umme Zahoora et al. |
| 2 | 963 | 10.8 | [Temporal pattern attention for multivariate time series forecasting](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10994-019-05815-0) | [Machine Learning](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/machine-learning.md) | 2019-06-11 | Shun-Yao Shih, Fan-Keng Sun, Hung-yi Lee |
| 3 | 911 | 9.1 | [ASTER: An Attentional Scene Text Recognizer with Flexible Rectification](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2018.2848939) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2018-06-25 | Baoguang Shi, Mingkun Yang, Xinggang Wang et al. |
| 4 | 800 | 7.7 | [A hybrid deep learning based traffic flow prediction method and its understanding](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2018.03.001) | [Transportation Research Part C Emerging Technologies](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/transportation-research-part-c-emerging-technologies.md) | 2018-03-20 | Yuankai Wu, Huachun Tan, Lingqiao Qin et al. |
| 5 | 698 | 11.7 | [A General Survey on Attention Mechanisms in Deep Learning](https://doi.org/10.1109/tkde.2021.3126456) | [IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-knowledge-and-data-engineering.md) | 2021-11-09 | Gianni Brauwers, Flavius Frăsincar |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Papers on “attention mechanism”. Journal and Conference Research Rankings. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/attention-mechanism

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-keywords-attention-mechanism,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Papers on “attention mechanism”},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/attention-mechanism}},
  urldate = {2026-11-03},
  note = {Journal and Conference Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).