---
title: "Diffusion models research: papers, trends and top journals"
description: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “diffusion models” appeared in 829 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (787), operations research (13) and economics (8)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/diffusion-models
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/diffusion-models.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 “diffusion models” appeared in 829 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (787), operations research (13) and economics (8). (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 “diffusion models”

Research on “diffusion models” 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 “diffusion models” appeared in 829 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (787), operations research (13) and economics (8).
- 303 of them were published in 2025, against 8 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Tsinghua University (47), Chinese Academy of Sciences (46) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (27).
- The journals publishing most of them were Pattern Recognition (121), Expert Systems with Applications (118) and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (115).
- The most-cited of them is “Diffusion Models in Vision: A Survey” (IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2023), with 1,913 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 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 14 | 92 | 298 | 371 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 1 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 7 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| [Statistics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/statistics.md) | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| [Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/information-systems.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 1 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| [Marketing](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/marketing.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| All categories | 8 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 6 | 17 | 94 | 303 | 382 |

## Where the papers come from

*Journals with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 121 |
| 2 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 118 |
| 3 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 115 |
| 4 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 81 |
| 5 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 65 |
| 6 | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 60 |
| 7 | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 41 |
| 8 | [Applied Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-intelligence.md) | 27 |
| 9 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 27 |
| 10 | [Artificial Intelligence Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/artificial-intelligence-review.md) | 24 |

*Institutions with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Tsinghua University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tsinghua-university.md) | 47 |
| 2 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 46 |
| 3 | [Shanghai Jiao Tong University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/shanghai-jiao-tong-university.md) | 27 |
| 4 | [University of Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 27 |
| 5 | [Nanyang Technological University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/nanyang-technological-university.md) | 23 |
| 6 | [Sun Yat-sen University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/sun-yat-sen-university.md) | 23 |
| 7 | [Wuhan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/wuhan-university.md) | 23 |
| 8 | [Beihang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/beihang-university.md) | 20 |
| 9 | [Harbin Institute of Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/harbin-institute-of-technology.md) | 20 |
| 10 | [National University of Defense Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/national-university-of-defense-technology.md) | 20 |

*Countries with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 647 |
| 2 | United States | 60 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 52 |
| 4 | Hong Kong | 40 |
| 5 | Singapore | 37 |
| 6 | Australia | 32 |
| 7 | South Korea | 27 |
| 8 | Japan | 18 |
| 9 | Germany | 17 |
| 10 | Macao | 16 |

*Keywords with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | text-to-image generation | 50 |
| 2 | [generative adversarial networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/generative-adversarial-networks.md) | 46 |
| 3 | image generation | 38 |
| 4 | [data augmentation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/data-augmentation.md) | 34 |
| 5 | generative models | 31 |
| 6 | [large language models](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/large-language-models.md) | 22 |
| 7 | variational autoencoder | 22 |
| 8 | image restoration | 21 |
| 9 | [multimodal fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/multimodal-fusion.md) | 21 |

## Most-cited papers

*Most-cited papers since 2017*

| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1,913 | 44.2 | [Diffusion Models in Vision: A Survey](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2023.3261988) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2023-03-27 | Florinel-Alin Croitoru, Vlad Hondru, Radu Tudor Ionescu et al. |
| 2 | 661 | 6.3 | [Influence Maximization on Social Graphs: A Survey](https://doi.org/10.1109/tkde.2018.2807843) | [IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-knowledge-and-data-engineering.md) | 2018-02-22 | Yuchen Li, Ju Fan, Yanhao Wang et al. |
| 3 | 555 | 16.8 | [A Survey on Generative Diffusion Models](https://doi.org/10.1109/tkde.2024.3361474) | [IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-knowledge-and-data-engineering.md) | 2024-02-02 | Hanqun Cao, Cheng Tan, Zhangyang Gao et al. |
| 4 | 512 | 19.4 | [A Survey on Deep Neural Network Pruning: Taxonomy, Comparison, Analysis, and Recommendations](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2024.3447085) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2024-08-21 | Hongrong Cheng, Miao Zhang, Qinfeng Shi |
| 5 | 437 | 13.2 | [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation With Diffusion Model](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2024.3355414) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2024-01-29 | Mingyuan Zhang, Zhongang Cai, Liang Pan et al. |

## Research ideas that follow this keyword

- [Synthetic financial data from diffusion models](https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/synthetic-financial-data-from-diffusion-models.md)

## Cite this page

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

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