---
title: "Unsupervised learning research: papers and trends"
description: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “unsupervised learning” appeared in 857 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (759), operations research (39) and statistics (14)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/unsupervised-learning
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/unsupervised-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 “unsupervised learning” appeared in 857 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (759), operations research (39) and statistics (14). (as of 2026-11-04)"
data_url: https://scholar4ai.com/data/rankings.json
updated: 2026-11-04T00:03:46+09:00
window: 2026-10-06 to 2026-11-04
source: OpenAlex (CC0)
---

# Papers on “unsupervised learning”

Research on “unsupervised 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 “unsupervised learning” appeared in 857 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (759), operations research (39) and statistics (14).
- 102 of them were published in 2025, against 43 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (15), Sun Yat-sen University (15) and Nanyang Technological University (12).
- The journals publishing most of them were IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (44), Pattern Recognition (35) and Expert Systems with Applications (35).
- 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) | 39 | 41 | 66 | 63 | 93 | 120 | 92 | 95 | 91 | 59 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 2 | 1 | 0 | 6 | 2 | 6 | 10 | 4 | 5 | 3 |
| [Statistics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/statistics.md) | 0 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| [Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/information-systems.md) | 1 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 1 |
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 3 |
| [Higher Education and Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/higher-education-and-research.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 0 |
| [Marketing](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/marketing.md) | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| All categories | 43 | 50 | 68 | 75 | 100 | 135 | 108 | 106 | 102 | 70 |

## Where the papers come from

*Journals with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 44 |
| 2 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 35 |
| 3 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 35 |
| 4 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 32 |
| 5 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 30 |
| 6 | [IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-knowledge-and-data-engineering.md) | 23 |
| 7 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 22 |
| 8 | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 17 |
| 9 | [Applied Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-intelligence.md) | 13 |
| 10 | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 13 |

*Institutions with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 15 |
| 2 | [Sun Yat-sen University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/sun-yat-sen-university.md) | 15 |
| 3 | [Nanyang Technological University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/nanyang-technological-university.md) | 12 |
| 4 | [Tsinghua University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tsinghua-university.md) | 12 |
| 5 | [University of Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 12 |
| 6 | [National University of Defense Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/national-university-of-defense-technology.md) | 11 |
| 7 | [University of Electronic Science and Technology of China](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-electronic-science-and-technology-of-china.md) | 11 |
| 8 | [Northwestern Polytechnical University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/northwestern-polytechnical-university.md) | 10 |
| 9 | [Wuhan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/wuhan-university.md) | 9 |
| 10 | [South China University of Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/south-china-university-of-technology.md) | 8 |

*Countries with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 215 |
| 2 | United States | 47 |
| 3 | Singapore | 21 |
| 4 | Australia | 18 |
| 5 | United Kingdom | 18 |
| 6 | France | 16 |
| 7 | Italy | 14 |
| 8 | Canada | 13 |
| 9 | Germany | 13 |
| 10 | Spain | 13 |

*Keywords with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [anomaly detection](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/anomaly-detection.md) | 28 |
| 2 | supervised learning | 27 |
| 3 | [contrastive learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/contrastive-learning.md) | 25 |
| 4 | [graph neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/graph-neural-networks.md) | 17 |
| 5 | [semi-supervised learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/semi-supervised-learning.md) | 17 |
| 6 | [clustering](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/clustering.md) | 13 |
| 7 | [self-supervised learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/self-supervised-learning.md) | 13 |
| 8 | autoencoder | 12 |
| 9 | [data augmentation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/data-augmentation.md) | 12 |

## 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 | 2,308 | 30.7 | [U2Fusion: A Unified Unsupervised Image Fusion Network](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2020.3012548) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2020-07-28 | Han Xu, Jiayi Ma, Junjun Jiang et al. |
| 3 | 1,410 | 14.9 | [Deep learning in spiking neural networks](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2018.12.002) | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 2018-12-18 | Amirhossein Tavanaei, Masoud Ghodrati, Saeed Reza Kheradpisheh et al. |
| 4 | 673 | 7.1 | [Advances in Variational Inference](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2018.2889774) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2018-12-25 | Cheng Zhang, Judith Bütepage, Hedvig Kjellström et al. |
| 5 | 672 | 11.3 | [Multi-sensor information fusion based on machine learning for real applications in human activity recognition: State-of-the-art and research challenges](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2021.11.006) | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 2021-11-13 | Sen Qiu, Hongkai Zhao, Nan Jiang et al. |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Papers on “unsupervised learning”. Journal and Conference Research Rankings. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/unsupervised-learning

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-keywords-unsupervised-learning,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Papers on “unsupervised learning”},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/unsupervised-learning}},
  urldate = {2026-11-04},
  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/).