---
title: "Research in April 2024: top topics and papers"
description: "In April 2024, the tracked journals published 3,536 papers (finance 567, accounting 48, economics 730, management 422, operations research 486, AI 1,283). The most frequent keywords were “China” (106), “COVID-19 pandemic” (89) and “Chinese listed companies” (66)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2024-04
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2024-04.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "In April 2024, the tracked journals published 3,536 papers (finance 567, accounting 48, economics 730, management 422, operations research 486, AI 1,283)."
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 April 2024

What the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals published in April 2024, 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 April 2024, the tracked journals published 3,536 papers (finance 567, accounting 48, economics 730, management 422, operations research 486, AI 1,283).
- The most frequent keywords were “China” (106), “COVID-19 pandemic” (89) and “Chinese listed companies” (66).
- Compared with their share in the twelve months before, the keywords that grew most were “image classification” (34 papers, +16), “digital transformation” (35 papers, +13) and “interpretability” (29 papers, +11).
- The institutions with the most papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (53), Tsinghua University (49) and Zhejiang University (49).
- China was involved in 42% of the papers.

## Papers by category

*Papers published in April 2024*

| Category | Papers |
|---|---:|
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 567 |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | 48 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 730 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 422 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 486 |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 1,283 |

## Top keywords

*Most frequent keywords, April 2024*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [China](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/china.md) | 106 |
| 2 | [COVID-19 pandemic](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/covid-19-pandemic.md) | 89 |
| 3 | [Chinese listed companies](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/chinese-listed-companies.md) | 66 |
| 4 | [corporate governance](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/corporate-governance.md) | 59 |
| 5 | state-owned enterprises | 51 |
| 6 | [graph neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/graph-neural-networks.md) | 47 |
| 7 | [financial constraints](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/financial-constraints.md) | 44 |
| 8 | [emerging markets](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/emerging-markets.md) | 41 |
| 9 | attention mechanism | 38 |
| 10 | moderating effect | 36 |
| 11 | [information asymmetry](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/information-asymmetry.md) | 35 |
| 12 | [digital transformation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/digital-transformation.md) | 35 |
| 13 | image classification | 34 |
| 14 | listed companies | 33 |
| 15 | [contrastive learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/contrastive-learning.md) | 32 |

## Growing keywords

*Papers in April 2024 beyond the keyword's share in the twelve months before*

| Keyword | Papers | At earlier share | Extra papers |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| image classification | 34 | 18.4 | +15.6 |
| [digital transformation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/digital-transformation.md) | 35 | 21.8 | +13.2 |
| interpretability | 29 | 17.8 | +11.2 |
| [artificial intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/artificial-intelligence.md) | 31 | 20.0 | +11.0 |
| Chinese stock market | 28 | 17.3 | +10.7 |
| regional heterogeneity | 26 | 16.0 | +10.0 |
| generative AI | 13 | 4.4 | +8.6 |
| ESG performance | 20 | 11.8 | +8.2 |
| [large language models](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/large-language-models.md) | 16 | 8.2 | +7.8 |
| technology adoption | 21 | 13.2 | +7.8 |

## Top keywords by category

*The five most frequent keywords per category, April 2024*

| Category | Most frequent keywords |
|---|---|
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | Chinese listed companies (48); China (44); COVID-19 pandemic (41); corporate governance (41); state-owned enterprises (35) |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | corporate governance (7); financial constraints (5); information asymmetry (4); China (3); accounting education (3) |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | China (47); COVID-19 pandemic (22); economic growth (20); gender differences (15); developing countries (14) |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | digital transformation (15); moderating effect (14); small and medium-sized enterprises (14); consumer behavior (13); emerging markets (13) |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | mixed-integer linear programming (21); multi-objective optimization (18); COVID-19 pandemic (15); combinatorial optimization (12); multi-criteria decision making (12) |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | graph neural networks (47); attention mechanism (34); image classification (34); contrastive learning (32); class imbalance (27) |

## Institutions

*Institutions with the most papers, April 2024*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 53 |
| 2 | [Tsinghua University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tsinghua-university.md) | 49 |
| 3 | [Zhejiang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhejiang-university.md) | 49 |
| 4 | [Wuhan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/wuhan-university.md) | 40 |
| 5 | [Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/centre-national-de-la-recherche-scientifique.md) | 38 |
| 6 | Harbin Institute of Technology | 37 |
| 7 | [Hong Kong Polytechnic University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/hong-kong-polytechnic-university.md) | 36 |
| 8 | [University of Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 36 |
| 9 | Sun Yat-sen University | 34 |
| 10 | [University of Electronic Science and Technology of China](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-electronic-science-and-technology-of-china.md) | 33 |

## Countries

*Countries, April 2024*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 1,483 |
| 2 | United States | 578 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 321 |
| 4 | Australia | 205 |
| 5 | Germany | 188 |
| 6 | Italy | 187 |
| 7 | France | 163 |
| 8 | India | 148 |
| 9 | Canada | 136 |
| 10 | Spain | 126 |

## Journals

*Journals with the most papers, April 2024*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 219 |
| 2 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 130 |
| 3 | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 129 |
| 4 | [Finance research letters](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/finance-research-letters.md) | 129 |
| 5 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 97 |
| 6 | [Applied Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-intelligence.md) | 86 |
| 7 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 75 |
| 8 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 73 |
| 9 | [International Review of Financial Analysis](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-review-of-financial-analysis.md) | 71 |
| 10 | [Energy Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/energy-economics.md) | 66 |

## Equations and models

*Most-mentioned equations and models, April 2024 (titles, abstracts and keywords)*

| # | Equation or model | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Scaled dot-product attention (Transformer)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/scaled-dot-product-attention-transformer.md) | 99 |
| 2 | [Graph neural network (graph convolution)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/graph-neural-network-graph-convolution.md) | 95 |
| 3 | [Linear and integer programming](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/linear-and-integer-programming.md) | 72 |
| 4 | [Convolutional neural network (CNN)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/convolutional-neural-network-cnn.md) | 65 |
| 5 | [Contrastive loss (InfoNCE)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/contrastive-loss-infonce.md) | 51 |
| 6 | [Long short-term memory (LSTM)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/long-short-term-memory-lstm.md) | 33 |
| 7 | [Support vector machine (SVM)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/support-vector-machine-svm.md) | 24 |
| 8 | [Difference-in-differences](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/difference-in-differences.md) | 23 |
| 9 | [Mediation model (indirect effect)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/mediation-model-indirect-effect.md) | 23 |
| 10 | [Generative adversarial network (GAN)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/generative-adversarial-network-gan.md) | 21 |

## Datasets

*Most-mentioned datasets, April 2024 (titles, abstracts and keywords)*

| # | Dataset | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | Economic Policy Uncertainty index | 21 |
| 2 | CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100 | 11 |
| 3 | ImageNet | 11 |
| 4 | Twitter / X | 11 |
| 5 | MNIST / Fashion-MNIST | 9 |
| 6 | S&P 500 | 9 |
| 7 | CEC benchmark functions | 8 |
| 8 | Climate Policy Uncertainty index | 8 |
| 9 | Night-time lights (VIIRS, DMSP) | 6 |
| 10 | VIX | 5 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Research published in April 2024. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 26, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2024-04

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-reports-2024-04,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Research published in April 2024},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2024-04}},
  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/).