---
title: "Transfer learning research: papers and trends"
description: "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)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/transfer-learning
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/transfer-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 “transfer learning” appeared in 1,651 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (1,494), operations research (63) and statistics (36). (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 “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.

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

## 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

*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) | 25 | 48 | 63 | 105 | 176 | 210 | 236 | 232 | 260 | 139 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 13 | 14 | 6 | 18 |
| [Statistics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/statistics.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 12 | 18 |
| [Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/information-systems.md) | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 5 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 |
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 0 |
| [Higher Education and Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/higher-education-and-research.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| [Marketing](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/marketing.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| [Tourism and Hospitality](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/tourism-and-hospitality.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 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

*Journals with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 193 |
| 2 | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 145 |
| 3 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 87 |
| 4 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 57 |
| 5 | [Applied Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-intelligence.md) | 45 |
| 6 | [Artificial Intelligence Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/artificial-intelligence-review.md) | 35 |
| 7 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 34 |
| 8 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 33 |
| 9 | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 32 |
| 10 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 30 |

*Institutions with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [China University of Petroleum, East China](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/china-university-of-petroleum-east-china.md) | 20 |
| 2 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 20 |
| 3 | [Shanghai Jiao Tong University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/shanghai-jiao-tong-university.md) | 20 |
| 4 | [Nanyang Technological University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/nanyang-technological-university.md) | 18 |
| 5 | [Zhejiang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhejiang-university.md) | 17 |
| 6 | [City University of Hong Kong](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/city-university-of-hong-kong.md) | 15 |
| 7 | [University of Electronic Science and Technology of China](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-electronic-science-and-technology-of-china.md) | 15 |
| 8 | [Harbin Institute of Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/harbin-institute-of-technology.md) | 14 |
| 9 | [Hong Kong Polytechnic University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/hong-kong-polytechnic-university.md) | 14 |
| 10 | [Sichuan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/sichuan-university.md) | 13 |

*Countries with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | 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 |

*Keywords with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [convolutional neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/convolutional-neural-networks.md) | 96 |
| 2 | [domain adaptation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/domain-adaptation.md) | 88 |
| 3 | [data augmentation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/data-augmentation.md) | 56 |
| 4 | fine-tuning | 50 |
| 5 | [class imbalance](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/class-imbalance.md) | 47 |
| 6 | [image classification](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/image-classification.md) | 34 |
| 7 | [self-supervised learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/self-supervised-learning.md) | 34 |
| 8 | data scarcity | 33 |
| 9 | [transformer models](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/transformer-models.md) | 32 |

## Most-cited papers

*Most-cited papers since 2017*

| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3,114 | 33.6 | [Continual lifelong learning with neural networks: A review](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2019.01.012) | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 2019-02-10 | German Ignacio Parisi, Ronald Kemker, Jose L. Part et al. |
| 2 | 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 |
| 3 | 1,592 | 17.0 | [Wider or Deeper: Revisiting the ResNet Model for Visual Recognition](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2019.01.006) | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 2019-01-06 | Zifeng Wu, Chunhua Shen, Anton van den Hengel |
| 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 | 1,253 | 16.1 | [Deep Subdomain Adaptation Network for Image Classification](https://doi.org/10.1109/tnnls.2020.2988928) | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 2020-05-04 | Yongchun Zhu, Fuzhen Zhuang, Jindong Wang et al. |

## Research ideas that follow this keyword

- [Transfer learning for credit across countries](https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/transfer-learning-for-credit-across-countries.md)

## 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

```bibtex
@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}
}
```

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