---
title: "Research in May 2025: top topics and papers"
description: "In May 2025, the tracked journals published 4,325 papers (finance 648, accounting 61, economics 921, management 442, operations research 575, AI 1,678). The most frequent keywords were “China” (156), “Chinese listed companies” (105) and “financial constraints” (83)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-05
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-05.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "In May 2025, the tracked journals published 4,325 papers (finance 648, accounting 61, economics 921, management 442, operations research 575, AI 1,678)."
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 May 2025

What the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals published in May 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 May 2025, the tracked journals published 4,325 papers (finance 648, accounting 61, economics 921, management 442, operations research 575, AI 1,678).
- The most frequent keywords were “China” (156), “Chinese listed companies” (105) and “financial constraints” (83).
- Compared with their share in the twelve months before, the keywords that grew most were “large language models” (80 papers, +34), “income inequality” (39 papers, +17) and “computational efficiency” (40 papers, +13).
- The institutions with the most papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (76), Tsinghua University (57) and Harbin Institute of Technology (55).
- China was involved in 46% of the papers.
- The most-cited paper published that month is “Parameter-efficient fine-tuning in large language models: a survey of methodologies” (Artificial Intelligence Review), with 186 citations so far.

## Papers by category

*Papers published in May 2025*

| Category | Papers |
|---|---:|
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 648 |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | 61 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 921 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 442 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 575 |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 1,678 |

## Top keywords

*Most frequent keywords, May 2025*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [China](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/china.md) | 156 |
| 2 | [Chinese listed companies](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/chinese-listed-companies.md) | 105 |
| 3 | [financial constraints](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/financial-constraints.md) | 83 |
| 4 | [large language models](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/large-language-models.md) | 80 |
| 5 | [corporate governance](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/corporate-governance.md) | 79 |
| 6 | [COVID-19 pandemic](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/covid-19-pandemic.md) | 74 |
| 7 | [graph neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/graph-neural-networks.md) | 61 |
| 8 | state-owned enterprises | 59 |
| 9 | [contrastive learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/contrastive-learning.md) | 50 |
| 10 | [information asymmetry](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/information-asymmetry.md) | 49 |
| 11 | regional heterogeneity | 49 |
| 12 | moderating effect | 48 |
| 13 | attention mechanism | 47 |
| 14 | [emerging markets](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/emerging-markets.md) | 44 |
| 15 | computational efficiency | 40 |

## Growing keywords

*Papers in May 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) | 80 | 46.2 | +33.8 |
| income inequality | 39 | 21.8 | +17.2 |
| computational efficiency | 40 | 26.6 | +13.4 |
| deep reinforcement learning | 35 | 22.5 | +12.5 |
| convergence analysis | 31 | 19.1 | +11.9 |
| approximation algorithms | 20 | 8.5 | +11.5 |
| supply chain resilience | 27 | 15.8 | +11.2 |
| graph attention networks | 21 | 10.1 | +10.9 |
| adversarial examples | 14 | 3.7 | +10.3 |
| domain generalization | 22 | 12.2 | +9.8 |

## Top keywords by category

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

| Category | Most frequent keywords |
|---|---|
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | Chinese listed companies (79); China (60); financial constraints (60); corporate governance (51); state-owned enterprises (43) |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | corporate governance (13); audit fees (4); Chinese listed companies (3); business risk (3); discretionary accruals (3) |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | China (81); income inequality (31); COVID-19 pandemic (23); CO2 emissions (21); economic growth (20) |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | moderating effect (16); digital transformation (14); purchase intention (14); COVID-19 pandemic (13); artificial intelligence (13) |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | approximation algorithms (18); supply chain resilience (17); mixed-integer linear programming (16); multi-objective optimization (16); makespan minimization (14) |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | large language models (70); graph neural networks (60); contrastive learning (49); attention mechanism (47); transformer models (38) |

## Institutions

*Institutions with the most papers, May 2025*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 76 |
| 2 | [Tsinghua University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tsinghua-university.md) | 57 |
| 3 | Harbin Institute of Technology | 55 |
| 4 | [Hong Kong Polytechnic University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/hong-kong-polytechnic-university.md) | 55 |
| 5 | Huazhong University of Science and Technology | 53 |
| 6 | Nanyang Technological University | 53 |
| 7 | [Zhejiang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhejiang-university.md) | 53 |
| 8 | [Xi'an Jiaotong University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/xi-an-jiaotong-university.md) | 50 |
| 9 | [Peking University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/peking-university.md) | 46 |
| 10 | Northwestern Polytechnical University | 44 |

## Countries

*Countries, May 2025*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 2,009 |
| 2 | United States | 626 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 347 |
| 4 | Italy | 227 |
| 5 | Germany | 203 |
| 6 | Australia | 189 |
| 7 | India | 181 |
| 8 | France | 162 |
| 9 | Hong Kong | 131 |
| 10 | Spain | 130 |

## Journals

*Journals with the most papers, May 2025*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 474 |
| 2 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 187 |
| 3 | [Finance research letters](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/finance-research-letters.md) | 151 |
| 4 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 128 |
| 5 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 122 |
| 6 | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 106 |
| 7 | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 97 |
| 8 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 91 |
| 9 | [Computers & Industrial Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/computers-industrial-engineering.md) | 87 |
| 10 | [Energy Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/energy-economics.md) | 86 |

## Equations and models

*Most-mentioned equations and models, May 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) | 153 |
| 2 | [Graph neural network (graph convolution)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/graph-neural-network-graph-convolution.md) | 130 |
| 3 | [Convolutional neural network (CNN)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/convolutional-neural-network-cnn.md) | 93 |
| 4 | [Contrastive loss (InfoNCE)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/contrastive-loss-infonce.md) | 78 |
| 5 | [Linear and integer programming](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/linear-and-integer-programming.md) | 70 |
| 6 | [Long short-term memory (LSTM)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/long-short-term-memory-lstm.md) | 55 |
| 7 | [Generative adversarial network (GAN)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/generative-adversarial-network-gan.md) | 32 |
| 8 | [Support vector machine (SVM)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/support-vector-machine-svm.md) | 31 |
| 9 | [Mediation model (indirect effect)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/mediation-model-indirect-effect.md) | 28 |
| 10 | [Random forest](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/random-forest.md) | 28 |

## Datasets

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

| # | Dataset | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | Economic Policy Uncertainty index | 20 |
| 2 | Twitter / X | 15 |
| 3 | S&P 500 | 12 |
| 4 | CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100 | 11 |
| 5 | ImageNet | 11 |
| 6 | CEC benchmark functions | 6 |
| 7 | MIMIC | 6 |
| 8 | MNIST / Fashion-MNIST | 6 |
| 9 | Brent crude oil | 5 |
| 10 | Climate Policy Uncertainty index | 5 |

## Most-cited papers published in May 2025

*Most-cited papers published in May 2025 (citations counted by OpenAlex, updated daily)*

| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 186 | 10.4 | [Parameter-efficient fine-tuning in large language models: a survey of methodologies](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-025-11236-4) | [Artificial Intelligence Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/artificial-intelligence-review.md) | 2025-05-02 | Luping Wang, Sheng Chen, Linnan Jiang et al. |
| 2 | 178 | 10.5 | [Transformers and large language models for efficient intrusion detection systems: A comprehensive survey](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2025.103347) | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 2025-05-29 | Hamza Kheddar |
| 3 | 170 | 9.9 | [Otter: A Multi-Modal Model With In-Context Instruction Tuning](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2025.3571946) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2025-05-20 | Bo Li, Yuanhan Zhang, Liangyu Chen et al. |
| 4 | 119 | 6.7 | [RMER-DT: Robust multimodal emotion recognition in conversational contexts based on diffusion and transformers](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2025.103268) | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 2025-05-06 | Xianxun Zhu, Yaoyang Wang, Yaoyang Wang et al. |
| 5 | 112 | 6.4 | [DiffusionAD: Norm-Guided One-Step Denoising Diffusion for Anomaly Detection](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2025.3570494) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2025-05-15 | Hui Zhang, Zheng Wang, Dan Zeng et al. |
| 6 | 103 | 5.9 | [Inadequacies of Large Language Model Benchmarks in the Era of Generative Artificial Intelligence](https://doi.org/10.1109/tai.2025.3569516) | [IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-artificial-intelligence.md) | 2025-05-13 | Timothy R. McIntosh, Teo Sušnjak, Nalin Asanka Gamagedara Arachchilage et al. |
| 7 | 89 | 5.2 | [Learning Self-Growth Maps for Fast and Accurate Imbalanced Streaming Data Clustering](https://doi.org/10.1109/tnnls.2025.3563769) | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 2025-05-20 | Yiqun Zhang, Sen Feng, Pengkai Wang et al. |
| 8 | 89 | 5.3 | [Overview of leakage scenarios in supervised machine learning](https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537-025-01193-8) | [Journal Of Big Data](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/journal-of-big-data.md) | 2025-05-29 | Leonard Sasse, Eliana Nicolaisen‐Sobesky, Juergen Dukart et al. |
| 9 | 81 | 4.7 | [A survey on physics informed reinforcement learning: Review and open problems](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2025.128166) | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 2025-05-14 | Chayan Banerjee, Kien Nguyen, Clinton Fookes et al. |
| 10 | 74 | 4.2 | [IGEV++: Iterative Multi-Range Geometry Encoding Volumes for Stereo Matching](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2025.3569218) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2025-05-12 | Gangwei Xu, Xianqi Wang, Zhaoxing Zhang et al. |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Research published in May 2025. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 26, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-05

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-reports-2025-05,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Research published in May 2025},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-05}},
  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/).