Large language models – ETO Research Almanac

ETO Research Almanac

Between 2018 and 2023, researchers published roughly

85,000

English-language articles on large language models

The global large language models literature grew

1,048%

between 2018 and 2023

Articles on large language models made up

of all articles on artificial intelligence

Authors from private companies contributed to

15%

of large language models articles

What counts as "large language models" research?•How precise are these numbers?•What are the other caveats?

Explore relevant research in the Map of Science

Data last updated October 13, 2025

Vital signs

84,899
large language models articles were released between 2018 and 2023 (estd.)
1,048%
growth in research between 2018 and 2023
5%
of all artificial intelligence articles focused on large language models

Citation impact

52
citations for the average large language models article
20
citations for the average artificial intelligence article

Countries

21%
of large language models articles have American authors
31%
have Chinese authors
11%
have European authors

Country	Articles (2018-2023)	Growth (2018-2023)	Global share	Citations per article
China	26,349	1,428%	31%	38
United States	17,803	488%	21%	92.7
United Kingdom	4,312	706%	5%	86.3

Top-cited articles

BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
2018: arXiv. 106,388 citations
An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale
2020: arXiv. 49,036 citations
Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
2020: arXiv. 45,880 citations
Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold
2021: Nature. 33,684 citations
Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision
2021: arXiv. 32,701 citations
Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows
2021: arXiv. 31,070 citations
RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach
2019: arXiv. 26,964 citations
Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners
2019. 23,216 citations
Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer
2019: arXiv. 21,524 citations
High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models
2021: arXiv. 20,047 citations

Research organizations

Top producers of large language models research (by article count)

#1 Chinese Academy of Sciences (China)
#2 Tsinghua University (China)
#3 Microsoft (United States)

Organization	Articles (2018-2023)	Citations per article	Country
Chinese Academy of Sciences	2,044	38.7	China
Tsinghua University	1,639	89.9	China
Microsoft	1,481	141.2	United States

Patents and industry

12%
of large language models articles are cited in patents
7%
of artificial intelligence articles are cited in patents
15%
of large language models articles had authors from private companies (vs 6% of artificial intelligence articles in general)

Top industry organizations by publication count

Company	Articles (2018-2023)	Citations per article	Country
Microsoft	1,481	141.2	United States
Google	1,246	343	United States
Alibaba Group	982	56.3	China

Research subject classifications are based on work supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation under Grant No. G-2023-22358. For details on our sourcing, methodology, and limitations, see the tool documentation.