---
title: "Research in August 2025: top topics and papers"
description: "In August 2025, the tracked journals published 3,954 papers (finance 733, accounting 55, economics 862, management 359, operations research 454, AI 1,491). The most frequent keywords were “China” (175), “Chinese listed companies” (122) and “corporate governance” (94)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-08
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-08.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "In August 2025, the tracked journals published 3,954 papers (finance 733, accounting 55, economics 862, management 359, operations research 454, AI 1,491)."
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 August 2025

What the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals published in August 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 August 2025, the tracked journals published 3,954 papers (finance 733, accounting 55, economics 862, management 359, operations research 454, AI 1,491).
- The most frequent keywords were “China” (175), “Chinese listed companies” (122) and “corporate governance” (94).
- Compared with their share in the twelve months before, the keywords that grew most were “large language models” (91 papers, +36), “regional heterogeneity” (72 papers, +33) and “listed companies” (58 papers, +22).
- The institutions with the most papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (80), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (50) and Zhejiang University (47).
- China was involved in 48% of the papers.
- The most-cited paper published that month is “AI Agents vs. Agentic AI: A Conceptual taxonomy, applications and challenges” (Information Fusion), with 268 citations so far.

## Papers by category

*Papers published in August 2025*

| Category | Papers |
|---|---:|
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 733 |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | 55 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 862 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 359 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 454 |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 1,491 |

## Top keywords

*Most frequent keywords, August 2025*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [China](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/china.md) | 175 |
| 2 | [Chinese listed companies](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/chinese-listed-companies.md) | 122 |
| 3 | [corporate governance](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/corporate-governance.md) | 94 |
| 4 | [financial constraints](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/financial-constraints.md) | 92 |
| 5 | [large language models](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/large-language-models.md) | 91 |
| 6 | regional heterogeneity | 72 |
| 7 | state-owned enterprises | 68 |
| 8 | [COVID-19 pandemic](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/covid-19-pandemic.md) | 62 |
| 9 | moderating effect | 61 |
| 10 | listed companies | 58 |
| 11 | [information asymmetry](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/information-asymmetry.md) | 57 |
| 12 | [graph neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/graph-neural-networks.md) | 54 |
| 13 | [green innovation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/green-innovation.md) | 51 |
| 14 | [digital transformation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/digital-transformation.md) | 46 |
| 15 | [artificial intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/artificial-intelligence.md) | 44 |

## Growing keywords

*Papers in August 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) | 91 | 55.0 | +36.0 |
| regional heterogeneity | 72 | 39.1 | +32.9 |
| listed companies | 58 | 35.7 | +22.3 |
| [green innovation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/green-innovation.md) | 51 | 34.0 | +17.0 |
| R&D investment | 36 | 19.6 | +16.4 |
| Mamba | 23 | 6.7 | +16.3 |
| emissions trading | 22 | 12.1 | +9.9 |
| information transparency | 19 | 9.3 | +9.7 |
| digital economy | 28 | 18.4 | +9.6 |
| digital finance | 20 | 10.8 | +9.2 |

## Top keywords by category

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

| Category | Most frequent keywords |
|---|---|
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | Chinese listed companies (96); China (86); financial constraints (69); corporate governance (61); regional heterogeneity (55) |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | corporate governance (9); information asymmetry (4); COVID-19 pandemic (3); Chinese listed companies (3); agency theory (3) |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | China (78); COVID-19 pandemic (21); green innovation (20); financial constraints (19); spillover effects (18) |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | corporate governance (15); competitive advantage (13); consumer behavior (12); digital transformation (12); purchase intention (12) |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | mixed-integer linear programming (18); adaptive large neighborhood search (14); multi-objective optimization (14); vehicle routing (13); robust optimization (12) |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | large language models (82); graph neural networks (53); contrastive learning (41); class imbalance (39); transformer models (31) |

## Institutions

*Institutions with the most papers, August 2025*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 80 |
| 2 | [Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/centre-national-de-la-recherche-scientifique.md) | 50 |
| 3 | [Zhejiang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhejiang-university.md) | 47 |
| 4 | [Tsinghua University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tsinghua-university.md) | 46 |
| 5 | [Peking University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/peking-university.md) | 43 |
| 6 | Shanghai Jiao Tong University | 43 |
| 7 | Sun Yat-sen University | 43 |
| 8 | [University of Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 43 |
| 9 | [Wuhan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/wuhan-university.md) | 41 |
| 10 | [Beijing Institute of Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/beijing-institute-of-technology.md) | 40 |

## Countries

*Countries, August 2025*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 1,896 |
| 2 | United States | 611 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 321 |
| 4 | Australia | 177 |
| 5 | India | 171 |
| 6 | France | 164 |
| 7 | Germany | 161 |
| 8 | Italy | 153 |
| 9 | Canada | 131 |
| 10 | Hong Kong | 130 |

## Journals

*Journals with the most papers, August 2025*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 278 |
| 2 | [Finance research letters](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/finance-research-letters.md) | 245 |
| 3 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 159 |
| 4 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 143 |
| 5 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 131 |
| 6 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 121 |
| 7 | [International Review of Economics & Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-review-of-economics-finance.md) | 98 |
| 8 | [International Review of Financial Analysis](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-review-of-financial-analysis.md) | 94 |
| 9 | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 81 |
| 10 | [Energy Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/energy-economics.md) | 75 |

## Equations and models

*Most-mentioned equations and models, August 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) | 114 |
| 2 | [Graph neural network (graph convolution)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/graph-neural-network-graph-convolution.md) | 113 |
| 3 | [Contrastive loss (InfoNCE)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/contrastive-loss-infonce.md) | 75 |
| 4 | [Linear and integer programming](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/linear-and-integer-programming.md) | 68 |
| 5 | [Convolutional neural network (CNN)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/convolutional-neural-network-cnn.md) | 66 |
| 6 | [Mediation model (indirect effect)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/mediation-model-indirect-effect.md) | 41 |
| 7 | [Long short-term memory (LSTM)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/long-short-term-memory-lstm.md) | 40 |
| 8 | [Difference-in-differences](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/difference-in-differences.md) | 35 |
| 9 | [Total factor productivity (Solow residual)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/total-factor-productivity-solow-residual.md) | 35 |
| 10 | [Instrumental variables (two-stage least squares)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/instrumental-variables-two-stage-least-squares.md) | 29 |

## Datasets

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

| # | Dataset | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | Economic Policy Uncertainty index | 18 |
| 2 | Climate Policy Uncertainty index | 14 |
| 3 | Twitter / X | 13 |
| 4 | S&P 500 | 12 |
| 5 | ImageNet | 10 |
| 6 | MS COCO | 8 |
| 7 | China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) | 7 |
| 8 | CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100 | 7 |
| 9 | Trade Policy Uncertainty index | 7 |
| 10 | KITTI | 6 |

## Most-cited papers published in August 2025

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

| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 268 | 19.0 | [AI Agents vs. Agentic AI: A Conceptual taxonomy, applications and challenges](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2025.103599) | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 2025-08-22 | Ranjan Sapkota, Konstantinos I. Roumeliotis, Manoj Karkee |
| 2 | 139 | 10.0 | [AI-induced Deskilling in Medicine: A Mixed-Method Review and Research Agenda for Healthcare and Beyond](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-025-11352-1) | [Artificial Intelligence Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/artificial-intelligence-review.md) | 2025-08-27 | Chiara Natali, Luca Marconi, Leslye Denisse Dias Duran et al. |
| 3 | 138 | 9.9 | [Two-way fixed effects, the two-way mundlak regression, and difference-in-differences estimators](https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-025-02807-z) | [Empirical Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/empirical-economics.md) | 2025-08-27 | Jeffrey M. Wooldridge |
| 4 | 119 | 8.4 | [Don’t push the button! Exploring data leakage risks in machine learning and transfer learning](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-025-11326-3) | [Artificial Intelligence Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/artificial-intelligence-review.md) | 2025-08-20 | Andrea Apicella, Francesco Isgrò, Roberto Prevete |
| 5 | 118 | 8.5 | [Diffusion Models for Image Restoration and Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-025-02570-9) | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 2025-08-28 | Xin Li, Yulin Ren, Xin Jin et al. |
| 6 | 109 | 7.5 | [An adaptive fused domain-cycling variational generative adversarial network for machine fault diagnosis under data scarcity](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2025.103616) | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 2025-08-08 | Xin Wang, Hongkai Jiang, Tao Zeng et al. |
| 7 | 100 | 6.8 | [A semantic-enhanced multi-modal remote sensing foundation model for Earth observation](https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-025-01078-8) | [Nature Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/nature-machine-intelligence.md) | 2025-08-04 | Kang Wu, Yingying Zhang, Yingying Zhang et al. |
| 8 | 100 | 7.2 | [Multi-agent reinforcement learning for resources allocation optimization: a survey](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-025-11340-5) | [Artificial Intelligence Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/artificial-intelligence-review.md) | 2025-08-27 | Mohamad Abdul Hady, Siyi Hu, Mahardhika Pratama et al. |
| 9 | 98 | 6.7 | [Intelligent Event Triggered Lane Keeping Security Control for Autonomous Vehicle Under DoS Attacks](https://doi.org/10.1109/tfuzz.2025.3597276) | [IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-fuzzy-systems.md) | 2025-08-08 | Fei Ding, Zuoyu Liu, Yafei Wang et al. |
| 10 | 98 | 6.8 | [Kolmogorov–Arnold graph neural networks for molecular property prediction](https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-025-01087-7) | [Nature Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/nature-machine-intelligence.md) | 2025-08-11 | Longlong Li, Yipeng Zhang, Guanghui Wang et al. |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Research published in August 2025. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 26, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-08

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-reports-2025-08,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Research published in August 2025},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-08}},
  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/).