---
title: "Image classification research: papers and trends"
description: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “image classification” appeared in 1,557 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (1,514), operations research (16) and statistics (13)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/image-classification
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/image-classification.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 “image classification” appeared in 1,557 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (1,514), operations research (16) and statistics (13). (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 “image classification”

Research on “image classification” 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 “image classification” appeared in 1,557 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (1,514), operations research (16) and statistics (13).
- 243 of them were published in 2025, against 58 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (39), University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (21) and Xidian University (20).
- The journals publishing most of them were Pattern Recognition (101), Neural Networks (93) and Expert Systems with Applications (90).
- The most-cited of them is “Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks” (IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2019), with 12,153 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) | 56 | 51 | 90 | 110 | 159 | 230 | 210 | 234 | 233 | 141 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 2 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 5 | 4 | 2 | 1 |
| [Statistics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/statistics.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 3 |
| [Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/information-systems.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| [Tourism and Hospitality](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/tourism-and-hospitality.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| [Marketing](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/marketing.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| All categories | 58 | 52 | 92 | 112 | 159 | 235 | 218 | 241 | 243 | 147 |

## Where the papers come from

*Journals with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 101 |
| 2 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 93 |
| 3 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 90 |
| 4 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 79 |
| 5 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 73 |
| 6 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 67 |
| 7 | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 60 |
| 8 | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 50 |
| 9 | [Applied Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-intelligence.md) | 40 |
| 10 | [IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-artificial-intelligence.md) | 38 |

*Institutions with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 39 |
| 2 | [University of Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 21 |
| 3 | [Xidian University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/xidian-university.md) | 20 |
| 4 | [Zhejiang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhejiang-university.md) | 20 |
| 5 | [Nanyang Technological University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/nanyang-technological-university.md) | 19 |
| 6 | [Peking University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/peking-university.md) | 19 |
| 7 | [Harbin Institute of Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/harbin-institute-of-technology.md) | 17 |
| 8 | [Institute of Automation](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/institute-of-automation.md) | 17 |
| 9 | [Tsinghua University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tsinghua-university.md) | 17 |
| 10 | [Nanjing University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/nanjing-university.md) | 15 |

*Countries with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 497 |
| 2 | United States | 84 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 55 |
| 4 | Australia | 54 |
| 5 | India | 39 |
| 6 | Germany | 33 |
| 7 | Hong Kong | 33 |
| 8 | Canada | 31 |
| 9 | South Korea | 31 |
| 10 | Turkey | 31 |

*Keywords with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [object detection](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/object-detection.md) | 115 |
| 2 | [semantic segmentation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/semantic-segmentation.md) | 78 |
| 3 | [convolutional neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/convolutional-neural-networks.md) | 77 |
| 4 | [vision transformer](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/vision-transformer.md) | 54 |
| 5 | [data augmentation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/data-augmentation.md) | 49 |
| 6 | [computational efficiency](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/computational-efficiency.md) | 43 |
| 7 | [knowledge distillation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/knowledge-distillation.md) | 41 |
| 8 | adversarial robustness | 37 |
| 9 | [transfer learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/transfer-learning.md) | 34 |

## Most-cited papers

*Most-cited papers since 2017*

| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 12,153 | 134.9 | [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2019.2913372) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2019-05-02 | Jie Hu, Li Shen, Samuel Albanie et al. |
| 2 | 6,898 | 81.4 | [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-Based Localization](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-019-01228-7) | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 2019-10-11 | Ramprasaath R. Selvaraju, Michael Cogswell, Abhishek Das et al. |
| 3 | 3,314 | 64.8 | [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-022-01653-1) | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 2022-07-31 | Kaiyang Zhou, Jingkang Yang, Chen Change Loy et al. |
| 4 | 3,135 | 40.0 | [A survey of the recent architectures of deep convolutional neural networks](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-020-09825-6) | [Artificial Intelligence Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/artificial-intelligence-review.md) | 2020-04-21 | Asifullah Khan, Anabia Sohail, Umme Zahoora et al. |
| 5 | 2,404 | 25.6 | [One Pixel Attack for Fooling Deep Neural Networks](https://doi.org/10.1109/tevc.2019.2890858) | [IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-evolutionary-computation.md) | 2019-01-04 | Jiawei Su, Danilo Vasconcellos Vargas, Kouichi Sakurai |

## Cite this page

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

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