---
title: "Self-attention research: papers, trends and top journals"
description: "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)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/self-attention
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/self-attention.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 “self-attention” appeared in 953 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (922), operations research (17) and economics (5). (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 “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.

Back to the ranking: https://scholar4ai.com/rankings/keywords.md

## 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

*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) | 0 | 0 | 5 | 31 | 63 | 117 | 184 | 160 | 222 | 140 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 5 | 7 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| [Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/information-systems.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| [Higher Education and Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/higher-education-and-research.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| [Marketing](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/marketing.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| [Statistics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/statistics.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| All categories | 0 | 0 | 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](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 173 |
| 2 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 82 |
| 3 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 79 |
| 4 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 55 |
| 5 | [Applied Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-intelligence.md) | 54 |
| 6 | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 45 |
| 7 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 44 |
| 8 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 34 |
| 9 | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 32 |
| 10 | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 17 |

*Institutions with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 35 |
| 2 | [Northwestern Polytechnical University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/northwestern-polytechnical-university.md) | 23 |
| 3 | [University of Electronic Science and Technology of China](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-electronic-science-and-technology-of-china.md) | 20 |
| 4 | [Xidian University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/xidian-university.md) | 20 |
| 5 | [Harbin Institute of Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/harbin-institute-of-technology.md) | 18 |
| 6 | [University of Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 18 |
| 7 | [Shanghai Jiao Tong University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/shanghai-jiao-tong-university.md) | 15 |
| 8 | [Zhejiang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhejiang-university.md) | 15 |
| 9 | [Wuhan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/wuhan-university.md) | 14 |
| 10 | [Southeast University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/southeast-university.md) | 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](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/transformer-models.md) | 90 |
| 2 | [vision transformer](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/vision-transformer.md) | 53 |
| 3 | cross-attention | 48 |
| 4 | [computational efficiency](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/computational-efficiency.md) | 38 |
| 5 | long-range dependencies | 35 |
| 6 | [graph neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/graph-neural-networks.md) | 27 |
| 7 | medical image segmentation | 25 |
| 8 | [multimodal fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/multimodal-fusion.md) | 24 |
| 9 | [attention mechanism](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/attention-mechanism.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2022.3152247) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijforecast.2021.03.012) | [International Journal of Forecasting](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-forecasting.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1109/tkde.2021.3056502) | [IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-knowledge-and-data-engineering.md) | 2021-02-03 | Shengnan Guo, Youfang Lin, Huaiyu Wan et al. |
| 4 | 758 | 13.8 | [Contextual Transformer Networks for Visual Recognition](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2022.3164083) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2022.3211006) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 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

```bibtex
@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}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).