Papers on “combinatorial optimization”
Research on “combinatorial optimization” 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. Also as Markdown.
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Key findings#
- From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “combinatorial optimization” appeared in 1,676 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in operations research (1,222), AI (431) and economics (7).
- 169 of them were published in 2025, against 167 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (31), Huazhong University of Science and Technology (13) and University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (13).
- The journals publishing most of them were Computers & Operations Research (93), European Journal of Operational Research (68) and Expert Systems with Applications (41).
- The most-cited of them is “Reinforcement learning for combinatorial optimization: A survey” (Computers & Operations Research, 2021), with 746 citations.
Papers per year#
20172026 (so far)
| Category | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 (so far) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Operations Research | 140 | 129 | 112 | 129 | 137 | 123 | 111 | 135 | 111 | 95 |
| AI | 26 | 32 | 31 | 35 | 54 | 75 | 35 | 45 | 53 | 45 |
| Economics | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 0 |
| Statistics | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Finance | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Information Systems | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Management | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| All categories | 167 | 161 | 145 | 166 | 194 | 200 | 150 | 184 | 169 | 140 |
Where the papers come from#
| # | Journal | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Computers & Operations Research | 93 |
| 2 | European Journal of Operational Research | 68 |
| 3 | Expert Systems with Applications | 41 |
| 4 | Annals of Operations Research | 37 |
| 5 | Journal of Combinatorial Optimization | 37 |
| 6 | Operations Research Letters | 28 |
| 7 | Mathematical Programming | 26 |
| 8 | Computers & Industrial Engineering | 24 |
| 9 | IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation | 24 |
| 10 | Journal of Heuristics | 21 |
| # | Institution | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique | 31 |
| 2 | Huazhong University of Science and Technology | 13 |
| 3 | University of Chinese Academy of Sciences | 13 |
| 4 | Chinese Academy of Sciences | 12 |
| 5 | National University of Defense Technology | 12 |
| 6 | Universitat de València | 12 |
| 7 | Université d'Angers | 11 |
| 8 | Tsinghua University | 10 |
| 9 | Universidad Rey Juan Carlos | 9 |
| 10 | University of Bologna | 9 |
| # | Country | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | China | 187 |
| 2 | United States | 88 |
| 3 | France | 66 |
| 4 | Germany | 55 |
| 5 | Spain | 50 |
| 6 | Italy | 50 |
| 7 | United Kingdom | 43 |
| 8 | Brazil | 35 |
| 9 | Canada | 30 |
| 10 | Netherlands | 22 |
| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | metaheuristic optimization | 82 |
| 2 | local search | 45 |
| 3 | traveling salesman problem | 44 |
| 4 | NP-hard problems | 39 |
| 5 | vehicle routing | 35 |
| 6 | approximation algorithms | 33 |
| 7 | NP-hardness | 27 |
| 8 | reinforcement learning | 25 |
| 9 | deep reinforcement learning | 24 |
Most-cited papers#
| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 746 | 11.4 | Reinforcement learning for combinatorial optimization: A survey | Computers & Operations Research | 2021-05-28 | Nina Mazyavkina, Sergey Sviridov, Sergei Ivanov et al. |
| 2 | 702 | 16.4 | An exhaustive review of the metaheuristic algorithms for search and optimization: taxonomy, applications, and open challenges | Artificial Intelligence Review | 2023-04-09 | Kanchan Rajwar, Kusum Deep, Swagatam Das |
| 3 | 494 | 7.4 | Graph Learning: A Survey | IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence | 2021-04-01 | Feng Xia, Ke Sun, Shuo Yu et al. |
| 4 | 466 | 7.0 | Machine learning at the service of meta-heuristics for solving combinatorial optimization problems: A state-of-the-art | European Journal of Operational Research | 2021-04-24 | Maryam Karimi-Mamaghan, Mehrdad Mohammadi, Patrick E. Meyer et al. |
| 5 | 355 | 8.6 | The flexible job shop scheduling problem: A review | European Journal of Operational Research | 2023-05-23 | Stéphane Dauzère‐Pérès, Junwen Ding, Liji Shen et al. |
Cite this page
Scholar4AI. (2026). Papers on “combinatorial optimization”. Journal and Conference Research Rankings. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/combinatorial-optimization
@misc{scholar4ai-keywords-combinatorial-optimization,
author = {{Scholar4AI}},
title = {Papers on “combinatorial optimization”},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/combinatorial-optimization}},
urldate = {2026-11-03},
note = {Journal and Conference Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}