---
title: "Transformer models research: papers and trends"
description: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “transformer models” appeared in 1,309 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (1,167), operations research (60) and finance (24)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/transformer-models
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/transformer-models.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 “transformer models” appeared in 1,309 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (1,167), operations research (60) and finance (24). (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 “transformer models”

Research on “transformer models” 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 “transformer models” appeared in 1,309 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (1,167), operations research (60) and finance (24).
- 392 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 (46), Tsinghua University (26) and University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (24).
- The journals publishing most of them were Expert Systems with Applications (214), Knowledge-Based Systems (109) and Pattern Recognition (94).
- 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 | 1 | 8 | 32 | 100 | 192 | 225 | 350 | 259 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 8 | 10 | 6 | 16 | 19 |
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 2 | 10 | 9 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 6 | 8 |
| [Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/information-systems.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 7 | 5 | 5 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 2 |
| [Higher Education and Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/higher-education-and-research.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| [Tourism and Hospitality](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/tourism-and-hospitality.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| [Statistics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/statistics.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| [Marketing](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/marketing.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| All categories | 0 | 0 | 1 | 8 | 36 | 112 | 213 | 244 | 392 | 303 |

## 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) | 214 |
| 2 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 109 |
| 3 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 94 |
| 4 | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 79 |
| 5 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 70 |
| 6 | [Applied Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-intelligence.md) | 66 |
| 7 | [Artificial Intelligence Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/artificial-intelligence-review.md) | 63 |
| 8 | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 63 |
| 9 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 41 |
| 10 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 34 |

*Institutions with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 46 |
| 2 | [Tsinghua University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tsinghua-university.md) | 26 |
| 3 | [University of Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 24 |
| 4 | [Peking University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/peking-university.md) | 20 |
| 5 | [Shanghai Jiao Tong University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/shanghai-jiao-tong-university.md) | 19 |
| 6 | [Zhejiang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhejiang-university.md) | 19 |
| 7 | [University of Electronic Science and Technology of China](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-electronic-science-and-technology-of-china.md) | 18 |
| 8 | [Beijing Institute of Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/beijing-institute-of-technology.md) | 17 |
| 9 | [Huazhong University of Science and Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/huazhong-university-of-science-and-technology.md) | 17 |
| 10 | [Hong Kong Polytechnic University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/hong-kong-polytechnic-university.md) | 16 |

*Countries with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 697 |
| 2 | United States | 128 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 60 |
| 4 | India | 57 |
| 5 | Australia | 53 |
| 6 | Hong Kong | 46 |
| 7 | South Korea | 41 |
| 8 | Canada | 36 |
| 9 | Germany | 34 |
| 10 | Spain | 32 |

*Keywords with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [self-attention](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/self-attention.md) | 90 |
| 2 | [attention mechanism](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/attention-mechanism.md) | 84 |
| 3 | [convolutional neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/convolutional-neural-networks.md) | 69 |
| 4 | [large language models](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/large-language-models.md) | 52 |
| 5 | [computational efficiency](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/computational-efficiency.md) | 41 |
| 6 | long-range dependencies | 41 |
| 7 | [multimodal fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/multimodal-fusion.md) | 38 |
| 8 | [graph neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/graph-neural-networks.md) | 37 |
| 9 | [time series forecasting](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/time-series-forecasting.md) | 37 |

## 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 | 1,075 | 25.7 | [Multimodal Learning With Transformers: A Survey](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2023.3275156) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2023-05-11 | Peng Xu, Xiatian Zhu, David Andrew Clifton |
| 3 | 664 | 9.7 | [Transformer models for text-based emotion detection: a review of BERT-based approaches](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-021-09958-2) | [Artificial Intelligence Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/artificial-intelligence-review.md) | 2021-02-08 | Francisca Adoma Acheampong, Henry Nunoo‐Mensah, Wenyu Chen |
| 4 | 617 | 12.5 | [scBERT as a large-scale pretrained deep language model for cell type annotation of single-cell RNA-seq data](https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00534-z) | [Nature Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/nature-machine-intelligence.md) | 2022-09-26 | Fan Yang, Wenchuan Wang, Fang Wang et al. |
| 5 | 519 | 10.3 | [TransFuser: Imitation With Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2022.3200245) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2022-08-19 | Kashyap Chitta, Aditya Prakash, Bernhard Jaeger et al. |

## Cite this page

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

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