Research published in January 2026

What the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals published in January 2026, 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. Also as Markdown.

Key findings#

In January 2026, the tracked journals published 4,959 papers (finance 567, accounting 82, economics 885, management 489, operations research 467, AI 2,469).
The most frequent keywords were “large language models” (174), “China” (131) and “Chinese listed companies” (112).
Compared with their share in the twelve months before, the keywords that grew most were “large language models” (174 papers, +74), “federated learning” (72 papers, +40) and “diffusion models” (71 papers, +40).
The institutions with the most papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (110), Tsinghua University (92) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (86).
China was involved in 54% of the papers.
The most-cited paper published that month is “Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Methods for Pretrained Language Models: A Critical Review and Assessment” (IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence), with 133 citations so far.

Papers by category#

Papers published in January 2026
Category	Papers
Finance	567
Accounting	82
Economics	885
Management	489
Operations Research	467
AI	2,469

Top keywords#

Most frequent keywords, January 2026
#	Keyword	Papers
1	large language models	174
2	China	131
3	Chinese listed companies	112
4	graph neural networks	81
5	corporate governance	74
6	financial constraints	74
7	federated learning	72
8	diffusion models	71
9	multi-objective optimization	66
10	multimodal fusion	66
11	state-owned enterprises	57
12	attention mechanism	55
13	contrastive learning	55
14	information asymmetry	53
15	knowledge distillation	51

Growing keywords#

Papers in January 2026 beyond the keyword's share in the twelve months before
Keyword	Papers	At earlier share	Extra papers
large language models	174	99.7	+74.3
federated learning	72	31.6	+40.4
diffusion models	71	31.0	+40.0
evolutionary algorithms	44	5.9	+38.1
multimodal fusion	66	37.5	+28.5
vision-language models	45	19.4	+25.6
multi-objective optimization	66	40.6	+25.4
continual learning	30	11.8	+18.2
catastrophic forgetting	36	18.5	+17.5
parameter-efficient fine-tuning	25	7.7	+17.3

Top keywords by category#

The five most frequent keywords per category, January 2026
Category	Most frequent keywords
Finance	Chinese listed companies (62); financial constraints (45); corporate governance (39); China (37); information asymmetry (31)
Accounting	corporate governance (18); Chinese listed companies (8); state-owned enterprises (7); earnings management (5); economic policy uncertainty (5)
Economics	China (82); Chinese listed companies (23); economic growth (22); financial constraints (21); environmental regulation (19)
Management	digital transformation (20); Chinese listed companies (17); dynamic capabilities (17); emerging markets (16); moderating effect (16)
Operations Research	mixed-integer linear programming (21); multi-objective optimization (18); demand uncertainty (16); mixed integer programming (15); vehicle routing (12)
AI	large language models (152); graph neural networks (75); diffusion models (71); federated learning (69); multimodal fusion (63)

Institutions#

Institutions with the most papers, January 2026
#	Institution	Papers
1	Chinese Academy of Sciences	110
2	Tsinghua University	92
3	Shanghai Jiao Tong University	86
4	Nanyang Technological University	80
5	Zhejiang University	79
6	Huazhong University of Science and Technology	78
7	Hong Kong Polytechnic University	77
8	Peking University	72
9	University of Science and Technology of China	71
10	Sun Yat-sen University	65

Countries#

Countries, January 2026
#	Country	Papers
1	China	2,656
2	United States	600
3	United Kingdom	377
4	Hong Kong	239
5	Australia	226
6	Germany	224
7	Italy	198
8	India	196
9	France	148
10	Singapore	147

Journals#

Journals with the most papers, January 2026
#	Journal	Papers
1	Expert Systems with Applications	362
2	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	297
3	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	288
4	IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation	196
5	Pattern Recognition	177
6	Knowledge-Based Systems	176
7	IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence	143
8	IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering	132
9	Neural Networks	124
10	Finance research letters	112

Equations and models#

Most-mentioned equations and models, January 2026 (titles, abstracts and keywords)
#	Equation or model	Papers
1	Scaled dot-product attention (Transformer)	69
2	Graph neural network (graph convolution)	65
3	Contrastive loss (InfoNCE)	33
4	Convolutional neural network (CNN)	31
5	Linear and integer programming	27
6	Generative adversarial network (GAN)	24
7	Q-learning	13
8	Variational autoencoder (ELBO)	12
9	Kullback-Leibler divergence	11
10	Long short-term memory (LSTM)	11

Datasets#

Most-mentioned datasets, January 2026 (titles, abstracts and keywords)
#	Dataset	Papers
1	ImageNet	13
2	CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100	12
3	CEC benchmark functions	6
4	MNIST / Fashion-MNIST	5
5	Action recognition (Kinetics, UCF101, HMDB51)	3
6	MS COCO	3
7	MuJoCo	3
8	nuScenes / Waymo Open / Argoverse	3
9	D4RL	2
10	Open Graph Benchmark	2

Most-cited papers published in January 2026#

Most-cited papers published in January 2026 (citations counted by OpenAlex, updated daily)
#	Citations	Per month	Title	Journal	Published	Authors
1	133	14.9	Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Methods for Pretrained Language Models: A Critical Review and Assessment	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2026-01-27	Lingling Xu, Haoran Xie, S. Joe Qin et al.
2	53	5.5	Urban green technology transfer networks and green finance development: Evidence from the Yangtze River Delta, China	Pacific-Basin Finance Journal	2026-01-05	Feng Hu, Huijie Yang, Shaobin Wei et al.
3	53	6.0	Deep transfer learning for image classification: a survey	Artificial Intelligence Review	2026-01-29	Jo Plested, Musa Phiri, Tom Gedeon
4	52	5.6	A review of machine learning with small and limited data	Journal Of Big Data	2026-01-16	M. Z. Naser
5	49	5.2	Graph Transformers: A Survey	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	2026-01-12	Ahsan Haider Shehzad, Feng Xia, Shagufta Abid et al.
6	47	4.9	From language to action: a review of large language models as autonomous agents and tool users	Artificial Intelligence Review	2026-01-06	Sadia Sultana Chowa, Riasad Alvi, S M Asif Ur Rahman et al.
7	43	4.4	A modified starfish optimization algorithm (M-SFOA) for global optimization problems and its application to heart disease risk prediction	Expert Systems with Applications	2026-01-03	Harun Akbulut
8	41	4.6	Information-theoretic graph fusion with vision-language-action model for policy reasoning and dual robotic control	Information Fusion	2026-01-29	Shunlei Li, Longsen Gao, Jin Wang et al.
9	40	4.1	Leveraging hierarchy-aware diffusion model and knowledge-enhanced contrastive learning for recommendation	Knowledge and Information Systems	2026-01-05	Kaibei Li, Yihao Zhang, Qinyang He et al.
10	40	4.4	Periodic Vibration Gaussian: Dynamic Urban Scene Reconstruction and Real-time Rendering	International Journal of Computer Vision	2026-01-23	Yurui Chen, Chun Gu, J H Jiang et al.

Cite this page

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

@misc{scholar4ai-reports-2026-01,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Research published in January 2026},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2026-01}},
  urldate = {2026-10-26},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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