---
title: "Research in October 2025: top topics and papers"
description: "In October 2025, the tracked journals published 3,737 papers (finance 621, accounting 49, economics 801, management 395, operations research 491, AI 1,380). The most frequent keywords were “China” (133), “Chinese listed companies” (112) and “large language models” (83)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-10
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-10.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "In October 2025, the tracked journals published 3,737 papers (finance 621, accounting 49, economics 801, management 395, operations research 491, AI 1,380)."
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 October 2025

What the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals published in October 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 October 2025, the tracked journals published 3,737 papers (finance 621, accounting 49, economics 801, management 395, operations research 491, AI 1,380).
- The most frequent keywords were “China” (133), “Chinese listed companies” (112) and “large language models” (83).
- Compared with their share in the twelve months before, the keywords that grew most were “explainable AI” (42 papers, +17), “digital infrastructure” (20 papers, +14) and “AI ethics” (22 papers, +12).
- The institutions with the most papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (55), Tsinghua University (54) and Sun Yat-sen University (46).
- China was involved in 48% of the papers.
- The most-cited paper published that month is “Theory and theory development: Guidelines for establishing theoretical gaps, foundations, contributions, and implications” (Journal of Business Research), with 165 citations so far.

## Papers by category

*Papers published in October 2025*

| Category | Papers |
|---|---:|
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 621 |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | 49 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 801 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 395 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 491 |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 1,380 |

## Top keywords

*Most frequent keywords, October 2025*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [China](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/china.md) | 133 |
| 2 | [Chinese listed companies](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/chinese-listed-companies.md) | 112 |
| 3 | [large language models](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/large-language-models.md) | 83 |
| 4 | [corporate governance](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/corporate-governance.md) | 83 |
| 5 | [financial constraints](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/financial-constraints.md) | 71 |
| 6 | state-owned enterprises | 65 |
| 7 | [COVID-19 pandemic](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/covid-19-pandemic.md) | 62 |
| 8 | [graph neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/graph-neural-networks.md) | 61 |
| 9 | [digital transformation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/digital-transformation.md) | 58 |
| 10 | regional heterogeneity | 50 |
| 11 | moderating effect | 45 |
| 12 | [explainable AI](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/explainable-ai.md) | 42 |
| 13 | [green innovation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/green-innovation.md) | 41 |
| 14 | [artificial intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/artificial-intelligence.md) | 40 |
| 15 | [contrastive learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/contrastive-learning.md) | 40 |

## Growing keywords

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

| Keyword | Papers | At earlier share | Extra papers |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| [explainable AI](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/explainable-ai.md) | 42 | 25.0 | +17.0 |
| digital infrastructure | 20 | 6.5 | +13.5 |
| AI ethics | 22 | 9.9 | +12.1 |
| diffusion models | 31 | 18.9 | +12.1 |
| generative AI | 29 | 17.8 | +11.2 |
| information transparency | 21 | 10.1 | +10.9 |
| mechanism design | 15 | 4.7 | +10.3 |
| digital twin | 16 | 6.5 | +9.5 |
| domain shift | 17 | 7.6 | +9.4 |
| inflation | 24 | 15.2 | +8.8 |

## Top keywords by category

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

| Category | Most frequent keywords |
|---|---|
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | Chinese listed companies (77); corporate governance (55); China (53); state-owned enterprises (46); financial constraints (44) |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | corporate governance (12); Chinese listed companies (4); financial constraints (3); tax avoidance (3); 10-K filings (2) |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | China (68); inflation (21); COVID-19 pandemic (20); monetary policy (19); income inequality (18) |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | digital transformation (18); Chinese listed companies (15); small and medium-sized enterprises (12); corporate social responsibility (10); dynamic capabilities (10) |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | mixed-integer linear programming (29); multi-objective optimization (14); distributionally robust optimization (13); COVID-19 pandemic (11); adaptive large neighborhood search (11) |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | large language models (66); graph neural networks (60); contrastive learning (40); class imbalance (34); explainable AI (33) |

## Institutions

*Institutions with the most papers, October 2025*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 55 |
| 2 | [Tsinghua University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tsinghua-university.md) | 54 |
| 3 | Sun Yat-sen University | 46 |
| 4 | Huazhong University of Science and Technology | 45 |
| 5 | [University of Electronic Science and Technology of China](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-electronic-science-and-technology-of-china.md) | 45 |
| 6 | [Hong Kong Polytechnic University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/hong-kong-polytechnic-university.md) | 41 |
| 7 | [Peking University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/peking-university.md) | 41 |
| 8 | [Zhejiang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhejiang-university.md) | 40 |
| 9 | Harbin Institute of Technology | 38 |
| 10 | [Tongji University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tongji-university.md) | 38 |

## Countries

*Countries, October 2025*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 1,779 |
| 2 | United States | 579 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 296 |
| 4 | Australia | 175 |
| 5 | Germany | 175 |
| 6 | Italy | 165 |
| 7 | France | 139 |
| 8 | Hong Kong | 131 |
| 9 | India | 131 |
| 10 | Canada | 120 |

## Journals

*Journals with the most papers, October 2025*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 275 |
| 2 | [Finance research letters](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/finance-research-letters.md) | 234 |
| 3 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 198 |
| 4 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 125 |
| 5 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 112 |
| 6 | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 81 |
| 7 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 75 |
| 8 | [Computers & Industrial Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/computers-industrial-engineering.md) | 74 |
| 9 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 71 |
| 10 | [AI & Society](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ai-society.md) | 68 |

## Equations and models

*Most-mentioned equations and models, October 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) | 29 |
| 2 | [Linear and integer programming](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/linear-and-integer-programming.md) | 28 |
| 3 | [Graph neural network (graph convolution)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/graph-neural-network-graph-convolution.md) | 25 |
| 4 | [Contrastive loss (InfoNCE)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/contrastive-loss-infonce.md) | 13 |
| 5 | [Convolutional neural network (CNN)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/convolutional-neural-network-cnn.md) | 6 |
| 6 | [Generative adversarial network (GAN)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/generative-adversarial-network-gan.md) | 6 |
| 7 | [Long short-term memory (LSTM)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/long-short-term-memory-lstm.md) | 6 |
| 8 | [Q-learning](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/q-learning.md) | 5 |
| 9 | [Stackelberg game](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/stackelberg-game.md) | 5 |
| 10 | [Kullback-Leibler divergence](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/kullback-leibler-divergence.md) | 4 |

## Datasets

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

| # | Dataset | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | ImageNet | 7 |
| 2 | CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100 | 5 |
| 3 | MS COCO | 4 |
| 4 | MNIST / Fashion-MNIST | 2 |
| 5 | MuJoCo | 2 |
| 6 | YouTube / TikTok | 2 |
| 7 | ADE20K | 1 |
| 8 | Cora / CiteSeer / PubMed (Planetoid) | 1 |
| 9 | Face recognition (LFW, CelebA, VGGFace2) | 1 |
| 10 | Facebook | 1 |

## Most-cited papers published in October 2025

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

| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 165 | 13.8 | [Theory and theory development: Guidelines for establishing theoretical gaps, foundations, contributions, and implications](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2025.115745) | [Journal of Business Research](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/journal-of-business-research.md) | 2025-10-27 | Weng Marc Lim |
| 2 | 118 | 10.0 | [Datasets for large language models: a comprehensive survey](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-025-11403-7) | [Artificial Intelligence Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/artificial-intelligence-review.md) | 2025-10-31 | Yang Liu, Jiahuan Cao, Chongyu Liu et al. |
| 3 | 117 | 9.5 | [Safeguarding large language models: a survey](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-025-11389-2) | [Artificial Intelligence Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/artificial-intelligence-review.md) | 2025-10-17 | Yi Dong, Ronghui Mu, Yanghao Zhang et al. |
| 4 | 64 | 5.3 | [Applications, classifications, and challenges: a comprehensive evaluation of recently developed metaheuristics for search and analysis](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-025-11377-6) | [Artificial Intelligence Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/artificial-intelligence-review.md) | 2025-10-23 | Muhammad Suhail Shaikh, Saurav Raj, Gengzhong Zheng et al. |
| 5 | 61 | 5.0 | [A survey on retrieval-augmentation generation (RAG) models for healthcare applications](https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-025-11666-9) | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 2025-10-16 | Mohamed Ahmed Abo El-Enen, Sally Saad, Taymoor Mohamed Nazmy |
| 6 | 58 | 4.7 | [CNNs, RNNs and Transformers in human action recognition: a survey and a hybrid model](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-025-11388-3) | [Artificial Intelligence Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/artificial-intelligence-review.md) | 2025-10-17 | Khaled Alomar, Halil Ibrahim Aysel, Xiaohao Cai |
| 7 | 51 | 4.3 | [Intelligent financial system: How AI is transforming finance](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfs.2025.101472) | [Journal of Financial Stability](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/journal-of-financial-stability.md) | 2025-10-29 | Iñaki Aldasoro, Leonardo Gambacorta, Anton Korinek et al. |
| 8 | 49 | 4.0 | [A Comprehensive Survey of Dynamic Graph Neural Networks: Models, Frameworks, Benchmarks, Experiments and Challenges](https://doi.org/10.1109/tkde.2025.3621291) | [IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-knowledge-and-data-engineering.md) | 2025-10-14 | ZhengZhao Feng, Rui Wang, TianXing Wang et al. |
| 9 | 48 | 3.8 | [Sample-efficient backtrack temporal difference deep reinforcement learning](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2025.114613) | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 2025-10-10 | Qi Liu, Pengbin Chen, Ke Lin et al. |
| 10 | 48 | 3.9 | [Resolving data bias improves generalization in binding affinity prediction](https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-025-01124-5) | [Nature Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/nature-machine-intelligence.md) | 2025-10-21 | David Graber, Peter Stockinger, Fabian Meyer et al. |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Research published in October 2025. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 26, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-10

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-reports-2025-10,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Research published in October 2025},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-10}},
  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/).