Papers on “self-attention”

Research on “self-attention” 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 “self-attention” appeared in 953 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (922), operations research (17) and economics (5).
229 of them were published in 2025, against 0 in 2017.
Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (35), Northwestern Polytechnical University (23) and University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (20).
The journals publishing most of them were Expert Systems with Applications (173), Pattern Recognition (82) and Knowledge-Based Systems (79).
The most-cited of them is “A Survey on Vision Transformer” (IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2022), with 4,688 citations.

Papers per year#

20172026 (so far)

Papers per publication year and category
Category	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025	2026 (so far)
AI	5	31	63	117	184	160	222	140
Operations Research	0	0	1	1	0	3	5	7
Economics	0	0	1	0	2	0	2	0
Information Systems	0	0	0	1	1	1	0	0
Finance	0	0	0	0	2	1	0	0
Higher Education and Research	0	0	0	0	1	0	0	0
Marketing	0	0	0	0	0	1	0	0
Statistics	0	0	0	0	0	1	0	0
All categories	5	31	65	119	190	167	229	147

Where the papers come from#

Journals with the most papers, since 2023
#	Journal	Papers
1	Expert Systems with Applications	173
2	Pattern Recognition	82
3	Knowledge-Based Systems	79
4	Neural Networks	55
5	Applied Intelligence	54
6	Neural Computing and Applications	45
7	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	44
8	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	34
9	Information Fusion	32
10	International Journal of Computer Vision	17

Institutions with the most papers, since 2023
#	Institution	Papers
1	Chinese Academy of Sciences	35
2	Northwestern Polytechnical University	23
3	University of Electronic Science and Technology of China	20
4	Xidian University	20
5	Harbin Institute of Technology	18
6	University of Chinese Academy of Sciences	18
7	Shanghai Jiao Tong University	15
8	Zhejiang University	15
9	Wuhan University	14
10	Southeast University	13

Countries with the most papers, since 2023
#	Country	Papers
1	China	577
2	United States	41
3	Australia	32
4	United Kingdom	30
5	India	30
6	Hong Kong	28
7	South Korea	22
8	Singapore	18
9	Canada	12
10	United Arab Emirates	10

Keywords with the most papers, since 2023
#	Keyword	Papers
1	transformer models	90
2	vision transformer	53
3	cross-attention	48
4	computational efficiency	38
5	long-range dependencies	35
6	graph neural networks	27
7	medical image segmentation	25
8	multimodal fusion	24
9	attention mechanism	22

Most-cited papers#

Most-cited papers since 2017
#	Citations	Per month	Title	Journal	Published	Authors
1	4,688	83.0	A Survey on Vision Transformer	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2022-02-18	Kai Han, Yunhe Wang, Hanting Chen et al.
2	3,279	50.8	Temporal Fusion Transformers for interpretable multi-horizon time series forecasting	International Journal of Forecasting	2021-06-16	Bryan Y. Lim, Sercan Ö. Arık, Nicolas Loeff et al.
3	774	11.2	Learning Dynamics and Heterogeneity of Spatial-Temporal Graph Data for Traffic Forecasting	IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering	2021-02-03	Shengnan Guo, Youfang Lin, Huaiyu Wan et al.
4	758	13.8	Contextual Transformer Networks for Visual Recognition	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2022-04-01	Yehao Li, Ting Yao, Yingwei Pan et al.
5	676	11.6	Beyond Self-Attention: External Attention Using Two Linear Layers for Visual Tasks	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2022-01-01	Meng-Hao Guo, Zheng-Ning Liu, Tai‐Jiang Mu et al.

Cite this page

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

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

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