---
title: "Autonomous driving research: papers and trends"
description: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “autonomous driving” appeared in 768 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (610), operations research (118) and management (22)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/autonomous-driving
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/autonomous-driving.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 “autonomous driving” appeared in 768 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (610), operations research (118) and management (22). (as of 2026-11-04)"
data_url: https://scholar4ai.com/data/rankings.json
updated: 2026-11-04T00:03:46+09:00
window: 2026-10-06 to 2026-11-04
source: OpenAlex (CC0)
---

# Papers on “autonomous driving”

Research on “autonomous driving” 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 “autonomous driving” appeared in 768 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (610), operations research (118) and management (22).
- 193 of them were published in 2025, against 14 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (26), Tongji University (26) and Nanyang Technological University (25).
- The journals publishing most of them were Expert Systems with Applications (114), Pattern Recognition (59) and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (56).
- The most-cited of them is “Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey” (IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2020), with 2,413 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) | 7 | 7 | 11 | 24 | 29 | 57 | 67 | 92 | 172 | 144 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 6 | 6 | 4 | 9 | 6 | 12 | 14 | 17 | 19 | 25 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 1 | 1 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 3 | 5 | 0 | 1 | 3 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 0 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| [Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/information-systems.md) | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| [Marketing](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/marketing.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| [Statistics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/statistics.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| All categories | 14 | 18 | 19 | 40 | 39 | 73 | 87 | 109 | 193 | 176 |

## 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) | 114 |
| 2 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 59 |
| 3 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 56 |
| 4 | [Transportation Research Part C Emerging Technologies](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/transportation-research-part-c-emerging-technologies.md) | 51 |
| 5 | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 37 |
| 6 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 36 |
| 7 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 30 |
| 8 | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 29 |
| 9 | [Applied Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-intelligence.md) | 28 |
| 10 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 17 |

*Institutions with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 26 |
| 2 | [Tongji University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tongji-university.md) | 26 |
| 3 | [Nanyang Technological University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/nanyang-technological-university.md) | 25 |
| 4 | [Beihang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/beihang-university.md) | 23 |
| 5 | [Tsinghua University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tsinghua-university.md) | 22 |
| 6 | [Beijing Institute of Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/beijing-institute-of-technology.md) | 19 |
| 7 | [Wuhan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/wuhan-university.md) | 16 |
| 8 | [Chang'an University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chang-an-university.md) | 15 |
| 9 | [Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/shanghai-artificial-intelligence-laboratory.md) | 15 |
| 10 | [Institute of Automation](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/institute-of-automation.md) | 14 |

*Countries with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 415 |
| 2 | United States | 61 |
| 3 | Hong Kong | 36 |
| 4 | Singapore | 35 |
| 5 | United Kingdom | 30 |
| 6 | Germany | 29 |
| 7 | Italy | 18 |
| 8 | Australia | 16 |
| 9 | India | 14 |
| 10 | Macao | 14 |

*Keywords with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | 3D object detection | 60 |
| 2 | [multimodal fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/multimodal-fusion.md) | 35 |
| 3 | [semantic segmentation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/semantic-segmentation.md) | 35 |
| 4 | [object detection](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/object-detection.md) | 33 |
| 5 | trajectory prediction | 33 |
| 6 | nuScenes | 29 |
| 7 | point clouds | 22 |
| 8 | LiDAR | 19 |
| 9 | [large language models](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/large-language-models.md) | 19 |

## Most-cited papers

*Most-cited papers since 2017*

| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2,413 | 31.7 | [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2020.3005434) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2020-06-29 | Yulan Guo, Hanyun Wang, Qingyong Hu et al. |
| 2 | 790 | 14.3 | [Human Action Recognition and Prediction: A Survey](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-022-01594-9) | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 2022-03-28 | Yu Kong, Yun Fu |
| 3 | 743 | 14.0 | [KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3D](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2022.3179507) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2022-06-01 | Yiyi Liao, Jun Xie, Andreas Geiger |
| 4 | 616 | 8.3 | [Deep Learning for LiDAR Point Clouds in Autonomous Driving: A Review](https://doi.org/10.1109/tnnls.2020.3015992) | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 2020-08-21 | Ying Li, Lingfei Ma, Zilong Zhong et al. |
| 5 | 614 | 7.0 | [The ApolloScape Open Dataset for Autonomous Driving and Its Application](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2019.2926463) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2019-07-07 | Xinyu Huang, Peng Wang, Xinjing Cheng et al. |

## Research ideas that follow this keyword

- [Autonomous driving and the economics of blame](https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/autonomous-driving-liability.md)

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Papers on “autonomous driving”. Journal and Conference Research Rankings. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/autonomous-driving

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-keywords-autonomous-driving,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Papers on “autonomous driving”},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/autonomous-driving}},
  urldate = {2026-11-04},
  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/).