---
title: "Catastrophic forgetting research: papers and trends"
description: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “catastrophic forgetting” appeared in 664 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (657), operations research (2) and information systems (2)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/catastrophic-forgetting
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/catastrophic-forgetting.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 “catastrophic forgetting” appeared in 664 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (657), operations research (2) and information systems (2). (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 “catastrophic forgetting”

Research on “catastrophic forgetting” 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 “catastrophic forgetting” appeared in 664 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (657), operations research (2) and information systems (2).
- 178 of them were published in 2025, against 4 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (51), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (29) and Nanyang Technological University (26).
- The journals publishing most of them were Pattern Recognition (78), Knowledge-Based Systems (74) and Neural Networks (72).
- The most-cited of them is “Learning without Forgetting” (IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2017), with 4,192 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) | 4 | 0 | 12 | 13 | 30 | 49 | 82 | 106 | 175 | 186 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| [Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/information-systems.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| All categories | 4 | 0 | 12 | 13 | 30 | 49 | 82 | 106 | 178 | 190 |

## Where the papers come from

*Journals with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 78 |
| 2 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 74 |
| 3 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 72 |
| 4 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 71 |
| 5 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 65 |
| 6 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 49 |
| 7 | [Applied Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-intelligence.md) | 25 |
| 8 | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 18 |
| 9 | [IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-knowledge-and-data-engineering.md) | 16 |
| 10 | [IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-artificial-intelligence.md) | 13 |

*Institutions with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 51 |
| 2 | [University of Electronic Science and Technology of China](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-electronic-science-and-technology-of-china.md) | 29 |
| 3 | [Nanyang Technological University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/nanyang-technological-university.md) | 26 |
| 4 | [University of Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 24 |
| 5 | [Tsinghua University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tsinghua-university.md) | 22 |
| 6 | [South China University of Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/south-china-university-of-technology.md) | 19 |
| 7 | [Institute of Automation](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/institute-of-automation.md) | 18 |
| 8 | [Harbin Institute of Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/harbin-institute-of-technology.md) | 17 |
| 9 | [Beihang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/beihang-university.md) | 14 |
| 10 | [National University of Defense Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/national-university-of-defense-technology.md) | 14 |

*Countries with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 433 |
| 2 | United States | 66 |
| 3 | Singapore | 43 |
| 4 | Australia | 37 |
| 5 | United Kingdom | 36 |
| 6 | Hong Kong | 28 |
| 7 | India | 18 |
| 8 | Italy | 14 |
| 9 | United Arab Emirates | 10 |
| 10 | South Korea | 10 |

*Keywords with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | continual learning | 244 |
| 2 | class-incremental learning | 98 |
| 3 | [knowledge distillation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/knowledge-distillation.md) | 86 |
| 4 | incremental learning | 41 |
| 5 | few-shot class-incremental learning | 35 |
| 6 | [knowledge transfer](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/knowledge-transfer.md) | 27 |
| 7 | [class imbalance](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/class-imbalance.md) | 26 |
| 8 | domain shift | 24 |
| 9 | parameter-efficient fine-tuning | 24 |

## Most-cited papers

*Most-cited papers since 2017*

| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4,192 | 39.0 | [Learning without Forgetting](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2017.2773081) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2017-11-14 | Zhizhong Li, Derek Hoiem |
| 2 | 3,114 | 33.6 | [Continual lifelong learning with neural networks: A review](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2019.01.012) | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 2019-02-10 | German Ignacio Parisi, Ronald Kemker, Jose L. Part et al. |
| 3 | 1,645 | 23.5 | [A continual learning survey: Defying forgetting in classification tasks](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2021.3057446) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2021-01-01 | Matthias Delange, Rahaf Aljundi, Marc Masana et al. |
| 4 | 1,114 | 34.6 | [A Comprehensive Survey of Continual Learning: Theory, Method and Application](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2024.3367329) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2024-02-26 | Liyuan Wang, Xingxing Zhang, Hang Su et al. |
| 5 | 741 | 15.2 | [Class-Incremental Learning: Survey and Performance Evaluation on Image Classification](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2022.3213473) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2022-10-10 | Marc Masana, Xialei Liu, Bartłomiej Twardowski et al. |

## Cite this page

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

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