---
title: "Research in December 2023: top topics and papers"
description: "In December 2023, the tracked journals published 3,140 papers (finance 392, accounting 57, economics 721, management 434, operations research 404, AI 1,132). The most frequent keywords were “COVID-19 pandemic” (103), “China” (98) and “corporate governance” (51)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2023-12
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2023-12.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "In December 2023, the tracked journals published 3,140 papers (finance 392, accounting 57, economics 721, management 434, operations research 404, AI 1,132)."
data_url: https://scholar4ai.com/data/rankings.json
updated: 2026-10-26T14:52:47+09:00
window: 2026-09-27 to 2026-10-26
source: OpenAlex (CC0)
---

# Research published in December 2023

What the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals published in December 2023, by publication date in OpenAlex. This page is a fixed monthly record: its address does not change. Counts can still grow a little as late papers are indexed, and citations are updated daily.

## Key findings

- In December 2023, the tracked journals published 3,140 papers (finance 392, accounting 57, economics 721, management 434, operations research 404, AI 1,132).
- The most frequent keywords were “COVID-19 pandemic” (103), “China” (98) and “corporate governance” (51).
- Compared with their share in the twelve months before, the keywords that grew most were “financial constraints” (48 papers, +17), “listed companies” (28 papers, +12) and “dynamic capabilities” (20 papers, +12).
- The institutions with the most papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (50), Xiamen University (37) and Lebanese American University (36).
- China was involved in 42% of the papers.

## Papers by category

*Papers published in December 2023*

| Category | Papers |
|---|---:|
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 392 |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | 57 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 721 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 434 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 404 |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 1,132 |

## Top keywords

*Most frequent keywords, December 2023*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [COVID-19 pandemic](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/covid-19-pandemic.md) | 103 |
| 2 | [China](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/china.md) | 98 |
| 3 | [corporate governance](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/corporate-governance.md) | 51 |
| 4 | [financial constraints](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/financial-constraints.md) | 48 |
| 5 | attention mechanism | 43 |
| 6 | multi-objective optimization | 39 |
| 7 | [Chinese listed companies](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/chinese-listed-companies.md) | 35 |
| 8 | state-owned enterprises | 34 |
| 9 | [information asymmetry](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/information-asymmetry.md) | 33 |
| 10 | convolutional neural networks | 31 |
| 11 | feature selection | 30 |
| 12 | listed companies | 28 |
| 13 | [contrastive learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/contrastive-learning.md) | 27 |
| 14 | [graph neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/graph-neural-networks.md) | 27 |
| 15 | corporate social responsibility | 27 |

## Growing keywords

*Papers in December 2023 beyond the keyword's share in the twelve months before*

| Keyword | Papers | At earlier share | Extra papers |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| [financial constraints](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/financial-constraints.md) | 48 | 30.7 | +17.3 |
| listed companies | 28 | 15.5 | +12.5 |
| dynamic capabilities | 20 | 8.0 | +12.0 |
| deep reinforcement learning | 23 | 13.3 | +9.7 |
| [contrastive learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/contrastive-learning.md) | 27 | 17.4 | +9.6 |
| interpretability | 24 | 14.6 | +9.4 |
| sustainable development | 20 | 10.7 | +9.3 |
| fine-tuning | 13 | 3.9 | +9.1 |
| last-mile delivery | 15 | 5.9 | +9.1 |
| [knowledge distillation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/knowledge-distillation.md) | 19 | 10.1 | +8.9 |

## Top keywords by category

*The five most frequent keywords per category, December 2023*

| Category | Most frequent keywords |
|---|---|
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | China (33); corporate governance (31); financial constraints (30); COVID-19 pandemic (27); Chinese listed companies (22) |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | corporate governance (8); earnings management (4); executive compensation (4); firm performance (4); accounting information systems (3) |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | China (48); COVID-19 pandemic (32); gender differences (21); climate policy (15); financial constraints (14) |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | COVID-19 pandemic (32); dynamic capabilities (18); multinational corporations (16); corporate social responsibility (14); consumer behavior (13) |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | multi-objective optimization (18); mixed-integer linear programming (14); last-mile delivery (12); COVID-19 pandemic (9); combinatorial optimization (9) |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | attention mechanism (39); convolutional neural networks (29); contrastive learning (27); data augmentation (25); feature selection (24) |

## Institutions

*Institutions with the most papers, December 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 50 |
| 2 | Xiamen University | 37 |
| 3 | Lebanese American University | 36 |
| 4 | [Zhejiang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhejiang-university.md) | 36 |
| 5 | [Hong Kong Polytechnic University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/hong-kong-polytechnic-university.md) | 35 |
| 6 | Northwestern Polytechnical University | 34 |
| 7 | [Peking University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/peking-university.md) | 34 |
| 8 | [Renmin University of China](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/renmin-university-of-china.md) | 34 |
| 9 | Sun Yat-sen University | 33 |
| 10 | [Wuhan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/wuhan-university.md) | 33 |

## Countries

*Countries, December 2023*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 1,331 |
| 2 | United States | 543 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 331 |
| 4 | Germany | 163 |
| 5 | Australia | 156 |
| 6 | Italy | 147 |
| 7 | India | 136 |
| 8 | France | 134 |
| 9 | Spain | 130 |
| 10 | Hong Kong | 108 |

## Journals

*Journals with the most papers, December 2023*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 298 |
| 2 | [Finance research letters](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/finance-research-letters.md) | 133 |
| 3 | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 132 |
| 4 | [Technological Forecasting and Social Change](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/technological-forecasting-and-social-change.md) | 107 |
| 5 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 103 |
| 6 | [Applied Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-intelligence.md) | 70 |
| 7 | [Annals of Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/annals-of-operations-research.md) | 69 |
| 8 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 65 |
| 9 | [Computers & Industrial Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/computers-industrial-engineering.md) | 65 |
| 10 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 62 |

## Equations and models

*Most-mentioned equations and models, December 2023 (titles, abstracts and keywords)*

| # | Equation or model | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Scaled dot-product attention (Transformer)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/scaled-dot-product-attention-transformer.md) | 122 |
| 2 | [Convolutional neural network (CNN)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/convolutional-neural-network-cnn.md) | 78 |
| 3 | [Graph neural network (graph convolution)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/graph-neural-network-graph-convolution.md) | 71 |
| 4 | [Linear and integer programming](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/linear-and-integer-programming.md) | 63 |
| 5 | [Contrastive loss (InfoNCE)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/contrastive-loss-infonce.md) | 37 |
| 6 | [Long short-term memory (LSTM)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/long-short-term-memory-lstm.md) | 37 |
| 7 | [Generative adversarial network (GAN)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/generative-adversarial-network-gan.md) | 28 |
| 8 | [Structural equation modeling (SEM)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/structural-equation-modeling-sem.md) | 24 |
| 9 | [Mediation model (indirect effect)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/mediation-model-indirect-effect.md) | 23 |
| 10 | [Support vector machine (SVM)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/support-vector-machine-svm.md) | 20 |

## Datasets

*Most-mentioned datasets, December 2023 (titles, abstracts and keywords)*

| # | Dataset | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | Economic Policy Uncertainty index | 13 |
| 2 | Twitter / X | 8 |
| 3 | CEC benchmark functions | 7 |
| 4 | ImageNet | 7 |
| 5 | MS COCO | 7 |
| 6 | KITTI | 6 |
| 7 | CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100 | 5 |
| 8 | Facebook | 5 |
| 9 | S&P 500 | 5 |
| 10 | VIX | 5 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Research published in December 2023. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 26, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2023-12

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-reports-2023-12,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Research published in December 2023},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2023-12}},
  urldate = {2026-10-26},
  note = {Journal 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/).