Papers on “deep reinforcement learning”

Research on “deep reinforcement learning” 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 “deep reinforcement learning” appeared in 1,255 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (886), operations research (305) and finance (24).
283 of them were published in 2025, against 6 in 2017.
Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Tsinghua University (32), Beihang University (20) and Beijing Jiaotong University (20).
The journals publishing most of them were Expert Systems with Applications (199), Computers & Industrial Engineering (73) and Applied Intelligence (64).
The most-cited of them is “Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Survey” (IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 2022), with 973 citations.

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	6	9	24	45	77	121	136	157	178	133
Operations Research	0	1	3	6	23	22	38	58	86	68
Finance	0	0	0	1	3	0	1	5	6	8
Information Systems	0	0	1	1	1	4	1	4	6	0
Economics	0	0	0	0	1	1	2	2	4	4
Management	0	0	0	0	1	0	2	0	0	1
Higher Education and Research	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	2	0
Tourism and Hospitality	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	0	0
Statistics	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	0
All categories	6	10	28	53	106	148	180	227	283	214

Where the papers come from#

Journals with the most papers, since 2023
#	Journal	Papers
1	Expert Systems with Applications	199
2	Computers & Industrial Engineering	73
3	Applied Intelligence	64
4	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	56
5	Knowledge-Based Systems	52
6	Transportation Research Part C Emerging Technologies	47
7	Neural Computing and Applications	42
8	Neural Networks	28
9	Computers & Operations Research	26
10	Transportation Research Part E Logistics and Transportation Review	26

Institutions with the most papers, since 2023
#	Institution	Papers
1	Tsinghua University	32
2	Beihang University	20
3	Beijing Jiaotong University	20
4	Eindhoven University of Technology	20
5	Huazhong University of Science and Technology	20
6	National University of Defense Technology	20
7	Hong Kong Polytechnic University	18
8	Southeast University	18
9	Nanyang Technological University	17
10	Tongji University	17

Countries with the most papers, since 2023
#	Country	Papers
1	China	584
2	United States	98
3	United Kingdom	45
4	Hong Kong	37
5	Netherlands	37
6	Singapore	35
7	Canada	33
8	Australia	32
9	India	29
10	South Korea	29

Keywords with the most papers, since 2023
#	Keyword	Papers
1	Markov decision process	101
2	proximal policy optimization	89
3	reward function design	67
4	deep Q-network	61
5	graph neural networks	36
6	double deep Q-network	35
7	soft actor-critic	35
8	multi-objective optimization	33
9	deep deterministic policy gradient	31

Most-cited papers#

Most-cited papers since 2017
#	Citations	Per month	Title	Journal	Published	Authors
1	973	19.8	Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Survey	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	2022-09-28	Xu Wang, Sen Wang, Xingxing Liang et al.
2	960	14.4	Multi-agent deep reinforcement learning: a survey	Artificial Intelligence Review	2021-04-15	Sven Gronauer, Klaus J. Diepold
3	861	21.5	Transfer Learning in Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Survey	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2023-07-04	Zhuangdi Zhu, Kaixiang Lin, Anil K. Jain et al.
4	846	8.1	Applications of Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning to Biological Data	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	2018-01-31	Mufti Mahmud, M. Shamim Kaiser, Amir Hussain et al.
5	794	12.4	Artificial intelligence in the creative industries: a review	Artificial Intelligence Review	2021-07-01	Nantheera Anantrasirichai, David Bull

Research ideas that follow this keyword#

Deep reinforcement learning for portfolios, replicated

Cite this page

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

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

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