Papers on “transfer learning”
Research on “transfer 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. Also as Markdown.
← Top research keywords · Keyword trends
Key findings#
- From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “transfer learning” appeared in 1,651 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (1,494), operations research (63) and statistics (36).
- 290 of them were published in 2025, against 28 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were China University of Petroleum, East China (20), Chinese Academy of Sciences (20) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (20).
- The journals publishing most of them were Expert Systems with Applications (193), Neural Computing and Applications (145) and Knowledge-Based Systems (87).
- The most-cited of them is “Continual lifelong learning with neural networks: A review” (Neural Networks, 2019), with 3,114 citations.
Papers per year#
20172026 (so far)
| Category | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 (so far) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI | 25 | 48 | 63 | 105 | 176 | 210 | 236 | 232 | 260 | 139 |
| Operations Research | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 13 | 14 | 6 | 18 |
| Statistics | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 12 | 18 |
| Information Systems | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 5 |
| Economics | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 |
| Finance | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 0 |
| Higher Education and Research | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| Marketing | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| Tourism and Hospitality | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| Management | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| All categories | 28 | 51 | 66 | 110 | 186 | 223 | 258 | 256 | 290 | 183 |
Where the papers come from#
| # | Journal | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Expert Systems with Applications | 193 |
| 2 | Neural Computing and Applications | 145 |
| 3 | Knowledge-Based Systems | 87 |
| 4 | Pattern Recognition | 57 |
| 5 | Applied Intelligence | 45 |
| 6 | Artificial Intelligence Review | 35 |
| 7 | IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence | 34 |
| 8 | IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems | 33 |
| 9 | Information Fusion | 32 |
| 10 | Neural Networks | 30 |
| # | Institution | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | China University of Petroleum, East China | 20 |
| 2 | Chinese Academy of Sciences | 20 |
| 3 | Shanghai Jiao Tong University | 20 |
| 4 | Nanyang Technological University | 18 |
| 5 | Zhejiang University | 17 |
| 6 | City University of Hong Kong | 15 |
| 7 | University of Electronic Science and Technology of China | 15 |
| 8 | Harbin Institute of Technology | 14 |
| 9 | Hong Kong Polytechnic University | 14 |
| 10 | Sichuan University | 13 |
| # | Country | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | China | 468 |
| 2 | India | 122 |
| 3 | United States | 103 |
| 4 | United Kingdom | 53 |
| 5 | Hong Kong | 47 |
| 6 | Australia | 42 |
| 7 | Turkey | 37 |
| 8 | Egypt | 36 |
| 9 | South Korea | 36 |
| 10 | Saudi Arabia | 36 |
| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | convolutional neural networks | 96 |
| 2 | domain adaptation | 88 |
| 3 | data augmentation | 56 |
| 4 | fine-tuning | 50 |
| 5 | class imbalance | 47 |
| 6 | image classification | 34 |
| 7 | self-supervised learning | 34 |
| 8 | data scarcity | 33 |
| 9 | transformer models | 32 |
Most-cited papers#
| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3,114 | 33.6 | Continual lifelong learning with neural networks: A review | Neural Networks | 2019-02-10 | German Ignacio Parisi, Ronald Kemker, Jose L. Part et al. |
| 2 | 1,743 | 27.4 | Text Data Augmentation for Deep Learning | Journal Of Big Data | 2021-07-19 | Connor Shorten, Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar, Borko Furht |
| 3 | 1,592 | 17.0 | Wider or Deeper: Revisiting the ResNet Model for Visual Recognition | Pattern Recognition | 2019-01-06 | Zifeng Wu, Chunhua Shen, Anton van den Hengel |
| 4 | 1,356 | 13.1 | Semantic Foggy Scene Understanding with Synthetic Data | International Journal of Computer Vision | 2018-03-23 | Christos Sakaridis, Dengxin Dai, Luc Van Gool |
| 5 | 1,253 | 16.1 | Deep Subdomain Adaptation Network for Image Classification | IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems | 2020-05-04 | Yongchun Zhu, Fuzhen Zhuang, Jindong Wang et al. |
Research ideas that follow this keyword#
Cite this page
Scholar4AI. (2026). Papers on “transfer learning”. Journal and Conference Research Rankings. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/transfer-learning
@misc{scholar4ai-keywords-transfer-learning,
author = {{Scholar4AI}},
title = {Papers on “transfer learning”},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/transfer-learning}},
urldate = {2026-11-03},
note = {Journal and Conference Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}