---
title: "Research in January 2025: top topics and papers"
description: "In January 2025, the tracked journals published 4,228 papers (finance 642, accounting 77, economics 889, management 377, operations research 478, AI 1,765). The most frequent keywords were “China” (111), “COVID-19 pandemic” (77) and “Chinese listed companies” (73)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-01
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-01.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "In January 2025, the tracked journals published 4,228 papers (finance 642, accounting 77, economics 889, management 377, operations research 478, AI 1,765)."
data_url: https://scholar4ai.com/data/rankings.json
updated: 2026-10-26T18:01:08+09:00
window: 2026-09-27 to 2026-10-26
source: OpenAlex (CC0)
---

# Research published in January 2025

What the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals published in January 2025, 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 January 2025, the tracked journals published 4,228 papers (finance 642, accounting 77, economics 889, management 377, operations research 478, AI 1,765).
- The most frequent keywords were “China” (111), “COVID-19 pandemic” (77) and “Chinese listed companies” (73).
- Compared with their share in the twelve months before, the keywords that grew most were “large language models” (61 papers, +33), “contrastive learning” (56 papers, +22) and “computational efficiency” (36 papers, +14).
- The institutions with the most papers were Tsinghua University (69), Xi'an Jiaotong University (67) and Chinese Academy of Sciences (61).
- China was involved in 45% of the papers.

## Papers by category

*Papers published in January 2025*

| Category | Papers |
|---|---:|
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 642 |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | 77 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 889 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 377 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 478 |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 1,765 |

## Top keywords

*Most frequent keywords, January 2025*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [China](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/china.md) | 111 |
| 2 | [COVID-19 pandemic](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/covid-19-pandemic.md) | 77 |
| 3 | [Chinese listed companies](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/chinese-listed-companies.md) | 73 |
| 4 | [corporate governance](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/corporate-governance.md) | 73 |
| 5 | [graph neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/graph-neural-networks.md) | 64 |
| 6 | [large language models](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/large-language-models.md) | 61 |
| 7 | [contrastive learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/contrastive-learning.md) | 56 |
| 8 | feature selection | 56 |
| 9 | state-owned enterprises | 55 |
| 10 | [financial constraints](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/financial-constraints.md) | 49 |
| 11 | attention mechanism | 41 |
| 12 | [digital transformation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/digital-transformation.md) | 41 |
| 13 | [green innovation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/green-innovation.md) | 41 |
| 14 | [information asymmetry](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/information-asymmetry.md) | 40 |
| 15 | data augmentation | 39 |

## Growing keywords

*Papers in January 2025 beyond the keyword's share in the twelve months before*

| Keyword | Papers | At earlier share | Extra papers |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| [large language models](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/large-language-models.md) | 61 | 28.1 | +32.9 |
| [contrastive learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/contrastive-learning.md) | 56 | 34.3 | +21.7 |
| computational efficiency | 36 | 22.2 | +13.8 |
| pseudo-labeling | 30 | 17.4 | +12.6 |
| [federated learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/federated-learning.md) | 31 | 18.8 | +12.2 |
| non-convex optimization | 22 | 10.9 | +11.1 |
| [knowledge distillation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/knowledge-distillation.md) | 31 | 20.4 | +10.6 |
| 3D Gaussian Splatting | 11 | 0.6 | +10.4 |
| geopolitical risk | 26 | 16.5 | +9.5 |
| link prediction | 18 | 8.7 | +9.3 |

## Top keywords by category

*The five most frequent keywords per category, January 2025*

| Category | Most frequent keywords |
|---|---|
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | Chinese listed companies (54); China (47); corporate governance (41); state-owned enterprises (37); financial constraints (31) |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | corporate governance (19); audit quality (6); earnings management (5); fraud detection (5); 2008 financial crisis (3) |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | China (50); COVID-19 pandemic (34); economic growth (27); gender differences (21); human capital (18) |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | customer satisfaction (13); corporate social responsibility (12); digital transformation (10); innovation (10); corporate governance (9) |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | mixed-integer linear programming (18); multi-objective optimization (15); non-convex optimization (12); supply chain resilience (12); makespan minimization (11) |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | graph neural networks (62); contrastive learning (56); large language models (54); feature selection (46); attention mechanism (39) |

## Institutions

*Institutions with the most papers, January 2025*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Tsinghua University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tsinghua-university.md) | 69 |
| 2 | [Xi'an Jiaotong University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/xi-an-jiaotong-university.md) | 67 |
| 3 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 61 |
| 4 | [Zhejiang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhejiang-university.md) | 54 |
| 5 | Shanghai Jiao Tong University | 52 |
| 6 | [Hong Kong Polytechnic University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/hong-kong-polytechnic-university.md) | 47 |
| 7 | [Peking University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/peking-university.md) | 47 |
| 8 | [Wuhan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/wuhan-university.md) | 45 |
| 9 | Xiamen University | 43 |
| 10 | Nanyang Technological University | 42 |

## Countries

*Countries, January 2025*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 1,914 |
| 2 | United States | 612 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 336 |
| 4 | Germany | 213 |
| 5 | Australia | 192 |
| 6 | Italy | 169 |
| 7 | India | 166 |
| 8 | Hong Kong | 144 |
| 9 | France | 142 |
| 10 | Canada | 136 |

## Journals

*Journals with the most papers, January 2025*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 344 |
| 2 | [Applied Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-intelligence.md) | 144 |
| 3 | [Finance research letters](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/finance-research-letters.md) | 138 |
| 4 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 137 |
| 5 | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 128 |
| 6 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 123 |
| 7 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 109 |
| 8 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 92 |
| 9 | [International Review of Economics & Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-review-of-economics-finance.md) | 82 |
| 10 | [IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-knowledge-and-data-engineering.md) | 81 |

## Equations and models

*Most-mentioned equations and models, January 2025 (titles, abstracts and keywords)*

| # | Equation or model | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Scaled dot-product attention (Transformer)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/scaled-dot-product-attention-transformer.md) | 138 |
| 2 | [Graph neural network (graph convolution)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/graph-neural-network-graph-convolution.md) | 118 |
| 3 | [Contrastive loss (InfoNCE)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/contrastive-loss-infonce.md) | 81 |
| 4 | [Convolutional neural network (CNN)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/convolutional-neural-network-cnn.md) | 79 |
| 5 | [Linear and integer programming](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/linear-and-integer-programming.md) | 67 |
| 6 | [Long short-term memory (LSTM)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/long-short-term-memory-lstm.md) | 45 |
| 7 | [Support vector machine (SVM)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/support-vector-machine-svm.md) | 38 |
| 8 | [Generative adversarial network (GAN)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/generative-adversarial-network-gan.md) | 37 |
| 9 | [Mediation model (indirect effect)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/mediation-model-indirect-effect.md) | 33 |
| 10 | [Shapley value (SHAP)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/shapley-value-shap.md) | 29 |

## Datasets

*Most-mentioned datasets, January 2025 (titles, abstracts and keywords)*

| # | Dataset | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | Economic Policy Uncertainty index | 21 |
| 2 | Twitter / X | 18 |
| 3 | CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100 | 15 |
| 4 | ImageNet | 14 |
| 5 | S&P 500 | 13 |
| 6 | CEC benchmark functions | 9 |
| 7 | MNIST / Fashion-MNIST | 9 |
| 8 | VIX | 9 |
| 9 | Climate Policy Uncertainty index | 8 |
| 10 | nuScenes / Waymo Open / Argoverse | 8 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Research published in January 2025. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 26, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-01

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-reports-2025-01,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Research published in January 2025},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-01}},
  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/).