---
title: "Research in December 2025: top topics and papers"
description: "In December 2025, the tracked journals published 4,049 papers (finance 708, accounting 56, economics 806, management 409, operations research 454, AI 1,616). The most frequent keywords were “China” (160), “Chinese listed companies” (151) and “large language models” (114)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-12
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-12.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "In December 2025, the tracked journals published 4,049 papers (finance 708, accounting 56, economics 806, management 409, operations research 454, AI 1,616)."
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 December 2025

What the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals published in December 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 December 2025, the tracked journals published 4,049 papers (finance 708, accounting 56, economics 806, management 409, operations research 454, AI 1,616).
- The most frequent keywords were “China” (160), “Chinese listed companies” (151) and “large language models” (114).
- Compared with their share in the twelve months before, the keywords that grew most were “large language models” (114 papers, +38), “mediating effect” (45 papers, +18) and “diffusion models” (39 papers, +16).
- The institutions with the most papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (63), Tsinghua University (61) and Hong Kong Polytechnic University (54).
- China was involved in 51% of the papers.
- The most-cited paper published that month is “Accuracy, precision, recall, f1-score, or MCC? empirical evidence from advanced statistics, ML, and XAI for evaluating business predictive models” (Journal Of Big Data), with 109 citations so far.

## Papers by category

*Papers published in December 2025*

| Category | Papers |
|---|---:|
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 708 |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | 56 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 806 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 409 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 454 |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 1,616 |

## Top keywords

*Most frequent keywords, December 2025*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [China](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/china.md) | 160 |
| 2 | [Chinese listed companies](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/chinese-listed-companies.md) | 151 |
| 3 | [large language models](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/large-language-models.md) | 114 |
| 4 | [financial constraints](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/financial-constraints.md) | 89 |
| 5 | [corporate governance](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/corporate-governance.md) | 82 |
| 6 | state-owned enterprises | 72 |
| 7 | [COVID-19 pandemic](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/covid-19-pandemic.md) | 66 |
| 8 | [graph neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/graph-neural-networks.md) | 60 |
| 9 | [artificial intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/artificial-intelligence.md) | 59 |
| 10 | [contrastive learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/contrastive-learning.md) | 54 |
| 11 | [digital transformation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/digital-transformation.md) | 53 |
| 12 | [emerging markets](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/emerging-markets.md) | 52 |
| 13 | moderating effect | 49 |
| 14 | mediating effect | 45 |
| 15 | [green innovation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/green-innovation.md) | 43 |

## Growing keywords

*Papers in December 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) | 114 | 75.6 | +38.4 |
| mediating effect | 45 | 26.7 | +18.3 |
| diffusion models | 39 | 23.4 | +15.6 |
| digital finance | 27 | 12.4 | +14.6 |
| vision-language models | 28 | 14.0 | +14.0 |
| Mamba | 25 | 11.5 | +13.5 |
| SHAP | 28 | 14.6 | +13.4 |
| behavioral finance | 19 | 7.4 | +11.6 |
| noise robustness | 24 | 12.7 | +11.3 |
| corporate risk-taking | 15 | 4.8 | +10.2 |

## Top keywords by category

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

| Category | Most frequent keywords |
|---|---|
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | Chinese listed companies (112); China (77); financial constraints (65); corporate governance (52); state-owned enterprises (51) |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | corporate governance (9); Chinese listed companies (7); audit fees (3); audit quality (3); disclosure quality (3) |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | China (66); COVID-19 pandemic (23); financial constraints (18); income inequality (18); state-owned enterprises (17) |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | digital transformation (19); purchase intention (15); artificial intelligence (14); China (13); Chinese listed companies (12) |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | multi-objective optimization (19); mixed-integer linear programming (18); demand uncertainty (15); mixed integer programming (14); supply chain resilience (12) |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | large language models (100); graph neural networks (56); contrastive learning (54); diffusion models (39); multimodal fusion (38) |

## Institutions

*Institutions with the most papers, December 2025*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 63 |
| 2 | [Tsinghua University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tsinghua-university.md) | 61 |
| 3 | [Hong Kong Polytechnic University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/hong-kong-polytechnic-university.md) | 54 |
| 4 | [Peking University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/peking-university.md) | 54 |
| 5 | [Zhejiang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhejiang-university.md) | 54 |
| 6 | [Southeast University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/southeast-university.md) | 49 |
| 7 | Northwestern Polytechnical University | 47 |
| 8 | [Tongji University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tongji-university.md) | 46 |
| 9 | [Xi'an Jiaotong University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/xi-an-jiaotong-university.md) | 43 |
| 10 | [University of Electronic Science and Technology of China](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-electronic-science-and-technology-of-china.md) | 42 |

## Countries

*Countries, December 2025*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 2,080 |
| 2 | United States | 526 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 282 |
| 4 | Australia | 170 |
| 5 | Germany | 167 |
| 6 | Italy | 160 |
| 7 | Hong Kong | 151 |
| 8 | France | 149 |
| 9 | South Korea | 128 |
| 10 | Canada | 123 |

## Journals

*Journals with the most papers, December 2025*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 388 |
| 2 | [Finance research letters](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/finance-research-letters.md) | 277 |
| 3 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 214 |
| 4 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 186 |
| 5 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 123 |
| 6 | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 98 |
| 7 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 95 |
| 8 | [International Review of Economics & Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-review-of-economics-finance.md) | 87 |
| 9 | [Computers & Industrial Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/computers-industrial-engineering.md) | 67 |
| 10 | [Information Processing & Management](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-processing-management.md) | 64 |

## Equations and models

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

| # | Equation or model | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Linear and integer programming](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/linear-and-integer-programming.md) | 25 |
| 2 | [Scaled dot-product attention (Transformer)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/scaled-dot-product-attention-transformer.md) | 22 |
| 3 | [Graph neural network (graph convolution)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/graph-neural-network-graph-convolution.md) | 21 |
| 4 | [Convolutional neural network (CNN)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/convolutional-neural-network-cnn.md) | 15 |
| 5 | [Contrastive loss (InfoNCE)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/contrastive-loss-infonce.md) | 11 |
| 6 | [Long short-term memory (LSTM)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/long-short-term-memory-lstm.md) | 9 |
| 7 | [Shapley value (SHAP)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/shapley-value-shap.md) | 9 |
| 8 | [Generative adversarial network (GAN)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/generative-adversarial-network-gan.md) | 5 |
| 9 | [Structural equation modeling (SEM)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/structural-equation-modeling-sem.md) | 5 |
| 10 | [Bellman equation](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/bellman-equation.md) | 4 |

## Datasets

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

| # | Dataset | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100 | 6 |
| 2 | ImageNet | 6 |
| 3 | MS COCO | 3 |
| 4 | nuScenes / Waymo Open / Argoverse | 3 |
| 5 | S&P 500 | 2 |
| 6 | Skeleton and pose (NTU RGB+D, Human3.6M) | 2 |
| 7 | Taobao / Tmall / JD.com | 2 |
| 8 | Action recognition (Kinetics, UCF101, HMDB51) | 1 |
| 9 | AudioSet / ESC-50 | 1 |
| 10 | Cityscapes | 1 |

## Most-cited papers published in December 2025

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

| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 109 | 10.3 | [Accuracy, precision, recall, f1-score, or MCC? empirical evidence from advanced statistics, ML, and XAI for evaluating business predictive models](https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537-025-01313-4) | [Journal Of Big Data](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/journal-of-big-data.md) | 2025-12-09 | Khaled Mahmud Sujon, rohayanti  binti hassan, Kwonhue Choi et al. |
| 2 | 48 | 4.8 | [Video Mamba Suite: State Space Model as a Versatile Alternative for Video Understanding](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-025-02597-y) | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 2025-12-26 | Guo Chen, Yifei Huang, Jilan Xu et al. |
| 3 | 36 | 3.5 | [Condition-Guided Diffusion for Multi-Modal Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction Incorporating Intention and Interaction Priors](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2025.3645918) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2025-12-18 | Yanghong Liu, Xingping Dong, Yutian Lin et al. |
| 4 | 35 | 3.2 | [AI-powered smart tourism 2.0: A 10-year retrospective and updated model](https://doi.org/10.1007/s12525-025-00847-y) | [Electronic Markets](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/electronic-markets.md) | 2025-12-01 | Chulmo Koo, Seunghun Shin, Ulrike Gretzel B et al. |
| 5 | 35 | 3.4 | [Multi-layer and multi-directional image encryption algorithm based on hyperchaotic 3D Xin-She Yang map](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2025.130808) | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 2025-12-13 | Uğur Erkan, Feyza Toktas, Abdurrahim Toktaş et al. |
| 6 | 33 | 3.2 | [Controllable Generation With Text-to-Image Diffusion Models: A Survey](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2025.3646548) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2025-12-19 | Pu Cao, Feng Zhou, Qing Song et al. |
| 7 | 31 | 2.9 | [The impacts of Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) on international trade and policy responses: from an economic and environmental equity perspective](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2025.115014) | [Energy Policy](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/energy-policy.md) | 2025-12-05 | Muhua Li, Yan Sun, Yan Xia et al. |
| 8 | 31 | 3.0 | [A comprehensive approach for image quality assessment using quality-centric embedding and ranking networks](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2025.112890) | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 2025-12-11 | Zeeshan Ali Haider, Sareer Ul Amin, Muhammad Fayaz et al. |
| 9 | 31 | 3.1 | [Extended reality (XR) for industrial assembly: A state-of-the-art review toward human-centric industry 5.0](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2025.130877) | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 2025-12-26 | M. Eswaran, Prasad Jones Christydass Samuel, S.K. Karthika et al. |
| 10 | 29 | 2.8 | [A psychometric framework for evaluating and shaping personality traits in large language models](https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-025-01115-6) | [Nature Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/nature-machine-intelligence.md) | 2025-12-18 | Gregory Serapio‐García, Mustafa Safdari, Clément Crepy et al. |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Research published in December 2025. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 26, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-12

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-reports-2025-12,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Research published in December 2025},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2025-12}},
  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/).