Papers on “K-means clustering”
Research on “K-means clustering” 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.
← Top research keywords · Keyword trends
Key findings#
- From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “K-means clustering” appeared in 869 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (548), operations research (172) and economics (35).
- 118 of them were published in 2025, against 50 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Northwestern Polytechnical University (11), Tsinghua University (9) and Xi'an Jiaotong University (8).
- The journals publishing most of them were Expert Systems with Applications (72), Pattern Recognition (20) and Knowledge-Based Systems (19).
- The most-cited of them is “K-means properties on six clustering benchmark datasets” (Applied Intelligence, 2018), with 519 citations.
Papers per year#
20172026 (so far)
| Category | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 (so far) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI | 31 | 38 | 35 | 67 | 51 | 89 | 67 | 61 | 66 | 43 |
| Operations Research | 12 | 7 | 11 | 13 | 21 | 24 | 16 | 22 | 32 | 14 |
| Economics | 1 | 2 | 1 | 5 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 6 | 8 | 6 |
| Information Systems | 1 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 5 |
| Finance | 0 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 0 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 8 |
| Statistics | 0 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 3 | 5 |
| Higher Education and Research | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 3 | 2 | 2 |
| Management | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 2 |
| Marketing | 0 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Tourism and Hospitality | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| All categories | 50 | 57 | 52 | 92 | 88 | 120 | 104 | 102 | 118 | 86 |
Where the papers come from#
| # | Journal | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Expert Systems with Applications | 72 |
| 2 | Pattern Recognition | 20 |
| 3 | Knowledge-Based Systems | 19 |
| 4 | Neural Computing and Applications | 18 |
| 5 | Computers & Industrial Engineering | 15 |
| 6 | Applied Intelligence | 12 |
| 7 | IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems | 12 |
| 8 | Journal Of Big Data | 12 |
| 9 | Knowledge and Information Systems | 11 |
| 10 | Annals of Operations Research | 9 |
| # | Institution | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Northwestern Polytechnical University | 11 |
| 2 | Tsinghua University | 9 |
| 3 | Xi'an Jiaotong University | 8 |
| 4 | National University of Defense Technology | 7 |
| 5 | Shenzhen University | 7 |
| 6 | Xidian University | 7 |
| 7 | South China University of Technology | 6 |
| 8 | Southeast University | 6 |
| 9 | Tongji University | 6 |
| 10 | Harbin Institute of Technology | 5 |
| # | Country | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | China | 176 |
| 2 | United States | 41 |
| 3 | India | 30 |
| 4 | United Kingdom | 28 |
| 5 | Iran | 20 |
| 6 | Spain | 18 |
| 7 | Australia | 15 |
| 8 | Taiwan | 15 |
| 9 | Brazil | 14 |
| 10 | Turkey | 12 |
| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | hierarchical clustering | 18 |
| 2 | customer segmentation | 17 |
| 3 | DBSCAN | 14 |
| 4 | unsupervised clustering | 13 |
| 5 | random forest | 12 |
| 6 | class imbalance | 11 |
| 7 | feature selection | 11 |
| 8 | multi-view clustering | 11 |
| 9 | spectral clustering | 11 |
Most-cited papers#
| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 519 | 5.2 | K-means properties on six clustering benchmark datasets | Applied Intelligence | 2018-07-26 | Pasi Fränti, Sami Sieranoja |
| 2 | 452 | 5.0 | How much can k-means be improved by using better initialization and repeats? | Pattern Recognition | 2019-04-15 | Pasi Fränti, Sami Sieranoja |
| 3 | 443 | 5.1 | Forecasting across time series databases using recurrent neural networks on groups of similar series: A clustering approach | Expert Systems with Applications | 2019-08-26 | Kasun Bandara, Christoph Bergmeir, Slawek Smyl |
| 4 | 396 | 11.6 | Plant disease detection and classification techniques: a comparative study of the performances | Journal Of Big Data | 2024-01-02 | Wubetu Barud Demilie |
| 5 | 376 | 3.4 | A consensus model for large-scale group decision making with hesitant fuzzy information and changeable clusters | Information Fusion | 2017-09-12 | Zhibin Wu, Jiuping Xu |
Cite this page
Scholar4AI. (2026). Papers on “K-means clustering”. Journal and Conference Research Rankings. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/k-means-clustering
@misc{scholar4ai-keywords-k-means-clustering,
author = {{Scholar4AI}},
title = {Papers on “K-means clustering”},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/k-means-clustering}},
urldate = {2026-11-03},
note = {Journal and Conference Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}