---
title: "Semi-supervised learning research: papers and trends"
description: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “semi-supervised learning” appeared in 1,288 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (1,222), operations research (31) and information systems (12)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/semi-supervised-learning
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/semi-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 “semi-supervised learning” appeared in 1,288 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (1,222), operations research (31) and information systems (12). (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 “semi-supervised learning”

Research on “semi-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 “semi-supervised learning” appeared in 1,288 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (1,222), operations research (31) and information systems (12).
- 215 of them were published in 2025, against 44 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (36), Northwestern Polytechnical University (27) and Nanyang Technological University (21).
- The journals publishing most of them were Expert Systems with Applications (110), Pattern Recognition (92) and Knowledge-Based Systems (81).
- The most-cited of them is “A Survey on Multi-Task Learning” (IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2021), with 2,909 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) | 42 | 53 | 82 | 95 | 115 | 138 | 170 | 173 | 201 | 153 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 1 | 0 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 3 | 5 | 7 | 5 |
| [Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/information-systems.md) | 1 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 2 |
| [Statistics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/statistics.md) | 0 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 0 |
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 0 |
| [Higher Education and Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/higher-education-and-research.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| [Marketing](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/marketing.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| All categories | 44 | 57 | 86 | 98 | 117 | 150 | 176 | 184 | 215 | 161 |

## 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) | 110 |
| 2 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 92 |
| 3 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 81 |
| 4 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 58 |
| 5 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 50 |
| 6 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 46 |
| 7 | [Applied Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-intelligence.md) | 44 |
| 8 | [IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-knowledge-and-data-engineering.md) | 31 |
| 9 | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 30 |
| 10 | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 24 |

*Institutions with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 36 |
| 2 | [Northwestern Polytechnical University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/northwestern-polytechnical-university.md) | 27 |
| 3 | [Nanyang Technological University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/nanyang-technological-university.md) | 21 |
| 4 | [Harbin Institute of Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/harbin-institute-of-technology.md) | 20 |
| 5 | [Shenzhen University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/shenzhen-university.md) | 19 |
| 6 | [Shandong University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/shandong-university.md) | 18 |
| 7 | [University of Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 18 |
| 8 | [Xi'an Jiaotong University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/xi-an-jiaotong-university.md) | 18 |
| 9 | [University of Electronic Science and Technology of China](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-electronic-science-and-technology-of-china.md) | 17 |
| 10 | [Shanghai Jiao Tong University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/shanghai-jiao-tong-university.md) | 16 |

*Countries with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 524 |
| 2 | United States | 75 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 46 |
| 4 | Australia | 45 |
| 5 | Singapore | 38 |
| 6 | Hong Kong | 27 |
| 7 | Canada | 21 |
| 8 | Spain | 20 |
| 9 | India | 17 |
| 10 | France | 15 |

*Keywords with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [pseudo-labeling](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/pseudo-labeling.md) | 158 |
| 2 | unlabeled data | 123 |
| 3 | limited labeled data | 86 |
| 4 | [contrastive learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/contrastive-learning.md) | 54 |
| 5 | [class imbalance](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/class-imbalance.md) | 52 |
| 6 | [data augmentation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/data-augmentation.md) | 40 |
| 7 | medical image segmentation | 39 |
| 8 | consistency regularization | 36 |
| 9 | [graph neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/graph-neural-networks.md) | 33 |

## Most-cited papers

*Most-cited papers since 2017*

| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2,909 | 43.3 | [A Survey on Multi-Task Learning](https://doi.org/10.1109/tkde.2021.3070203) | [IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-knowledge-and-data-engineering.md) | 2021-03-31 | Yu Zhang, Qiang Yang |
| 2 | 2,861 | 28.8 | [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2018.2858821) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2018-07-23 | Takeru Miyato, Shin‐ichi Maeda, Masanori Koyama et al. |
| 3 | 2,665 | 31.9 | [A survey on semi-supervised learning](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10994-019-05855-6) | [Machine Learning](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/machine-learning.md) | 2019-11-15 | Jesper E. van Engelen, Holger H. Hoos |
| 4 | 1,356 | 13.1 | [Semantic Foggy Scene Understanding with Synthetic Data](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-018-1072-8) | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 2018-03-23 | Christos Sakaridis, Dengxin Dai, Luc Van Gool |
| 5 | 1,050 | 9.0 | [Ensemble learning for data stream analysis: A survey](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2017.02.004) | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 2017-02-03 | Bartosz Krawczyk, Leandro Lei Minku, João Manuel Portela da Gama et al. |

## Cite this page

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

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