---
title: "Self-supervised learning research: papers and trends"
description: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “self-supervised learning” appeared in 1,264 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (1,241), operations research (11) and information systems (7)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/self-supervised-learning
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/self-supervised-learning.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-supervised learning” appeared in 1,264 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (1,241), operations research (11) and information systems (7). (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-supervised learning”

Research on “self-supervised learning” 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-supervised learning” appeared in 1,264 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (1,241), operations research (11) and information systems (7).
- 330 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 (62), Tsinghua University (34) and University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (33).
- The journals publishing most of them were Expert Systems with Applications (152), Pattern Recognition (139) and Knowledge-Based Systems (126).
- The most-cited of them is “ProtTrans: Toward Understanding the Language of Life Through Self-Supervised Learning” (IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2021), with 2,339 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 | 2 | 10 | 25 | 53 | 134 | 178 | 293 | 324 | 222 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 1 |
| [Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/information-systems.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| [Higher Education and Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/higher-education-and-research.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| [Statistics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/statistics.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| All categories | 0 | 2 | 10 | 26 | 55 | 136 | 181 | 298 | 330 | 226 |

## 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) | 152 |
| 2 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 139 |
| 3 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 126 |
| 4 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 99 |
| 5 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 83 |
| 6 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 80 |
| 7 | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 57 |
| 8 | [Applied Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-intelligence.md) | 56 |
| 9 | [IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-knowledge-and-data-engineering.md) | 45 |
| 10 | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 41 |

*Institutions with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 62 |
| 2 | [Tsinghua University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tsinghua-university.md) | 34 |
| 3 | [University of Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 33 |
| 4 | [Zhejiang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhejiang-university.md) | 31 |
| 5 | [Southeast University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/southeast-university.md) | 26 |
| 6 | [Sun Yat-sen University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/sun-yat-sen-university.md) | 25 |
| 7 | [Northwestern Polytechnical University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/northwestern-polytechnical-university.md) | 24 |
| 8 | [Xi'an Jiaotong University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/xi-an-jiaotong-university.md) | 24 |
| 9 | [Wuhan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/wuhan-university.md) | 23 |
| 10 | [Xidian University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/xidian-university.md) | 23 |

*Countries with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 793 |
| 2 | United States | 111 |
| 3 | Australia | 75 |
| 4 | United Kingdom | 68 |
| 5 | Hong Kong | 46 |
| 6 | South Korea | 41 |
| 7 | Singapore | 28 |
| 8 | Spain | 21 |
| 9 | India | 21 |
| 10 | Germany | 19 |

*Keywords with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [contrastive learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/contrastive-learning.md) | 205 |
| 2 | [graph neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/graph-neural-networks.md) | 76 |
| 3 | [pseudo-labeling](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/pseudo-labeling.md) | 48 |
| 4 | [representation learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/representation-learning.md) | 44 |
| 5 | limited labeled data | 43 |
| 6 | unlabeled data | 43 |
| 7 | [data augmentation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/data-augmentation.md) | 40 |
| 8 | graph contrastive learning | 36 |
| 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 | 2,339 | 36.6 | [ProtTrans: Toward Understanding the Language of Life Through Self-Supervised Learning](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2021.3095381) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2021-07-07 | Ahmed Elnaggar, Michael Heinzinger, Christian Dallago et al. |
| 2 | 2,036 | 26.1 | [Self-Supervised Visual Feature Learning With Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2020.2992393) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2020-05-04 | Longlong Jing, Yingli Tian |
| 3 | 1,845 | 26.3 | [Self-supervised Learning: Generative or Contrastive](https://doi.org/10.1109/tkde.2021.3090866) | [IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-knowledge-and-data-engineering.md) | 2021-01-01 | Xiao Liu, Fanjin Zhang, Zhenyu Hou et al. |
| 4 | 1,743 | 27.4 | [Text Data Augmentation for Deep Learning](https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537-021-00492-0) | [Journal Of Big Data](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/journal-of-big-data.md) | 2021-07-19 | Connor Shorten, Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar, Borko Furht |
| 5 | 1,400 | 15.1 | [Video Enhancement with Task-Oriented Flow](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-018-01144-2) | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 2019-02-12 | Tianfan Xue, Baian Chen, Jiajun Wu et al. |

## Cite this page

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

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