---
title: "Research in January 2026: top topics and papers"
description: "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)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2026-01
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2026-01.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "In January 2026, the tracked journals published 4,959 papers (finance 567, accounting 82, economics 885, management 489, operations research 467, AI 2,469)."
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 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.

## 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](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 567 |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | 82 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 885 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 489 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 467 |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 2,469 |

## Top keywords

*Most frequent keywords, January 2026*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [large language models](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/large-language-models.md) | 174 |
| 2 | [China](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/china.md) | 131 |
| 3 | [Chinese listed companies](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/chinese-listed-companies.md) | 112 |
| 4 | [graph neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/graph-neural-networks.md) | 81 |
| 5 | [corporate governance](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/corporate-governance.md) | 74 |
| 6 | [financial constraints](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/financial-constraints.md) | 74 |
| 7 | [federated learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/federated-learning.md) | 72 |
| 8 | diffusion models | 71 |
| 9 | multi-objective optimization | 66 |
| 10 | [multimodal fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/multimodal-fusion.md) | 66 |
| 11 | state-owned enterprises | 57 |
| 12 | attention mechanism | 55 |
| 13 | [contrastive learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/contrastive-learning.md) | 55 |
| 14 | [information asymmetry](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/information-asymmetry.md) | 53 |
| 15 | [knowledge distillation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/knowledge-distillation.md) | 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](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/large-language-models.md) | 174 | 99.7 | +74.3 |
| [federated learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/federated-learning.md) | 72 | 31.6 | +40.4 |
| diffusion models | 71 | 31.0 | +40.0 |
| evolutionary algorithms | 44 | 5.9 | +38.1 |
| [multimodal fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/multimodal-fusion.md) | 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](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | Chinese listed companies (62); financial constraints (45); corporate governance (39); China (37); information asymmetry (31) |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | corporate governance (18); Chinese listed companies (8); state-owned enterprises (7); earnings management (5); economic policy uncertainty (5) |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | China (82); Chinese listed companies (23); economic growth (22); financial constraints (21); environmental regulation (19) |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | digital transformation (20); Chinese listed companies (17); dynamic capabilities (17); emerging markets (16); moderating effect (16) |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | mixed-integer linear programming (21); multi-objective optimization (18); demand uncertainty (16); mixed integer programming (15); vehicle routing (12) |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 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](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 110 |
| 2 | [Tsinghua University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tsinghua-university.md) | 92 |
| 3 | Shanghai Jiao Tong University | 86 |
| 4 | Nanyang Technological University | 80 |
| 5 | [Zhejiang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhejiang-university.md) | 79 |
| 6 | Huazhong University of Science and Technology | 78 |
| 7 | [Hong Kong Polytechnic University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/hong-kong-polytechnic-university.md) | 77 |
| 8 | [Peking University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/peking-university.md) | 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](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 362 |
| 2 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 297 |
| 3 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 288 |
| 4 | [IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-evolutionary-computation.md) | 196 |
| 5 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 177 |
| 6 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 176 |
| 7 | [IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-artificial-intelligence.md) | 143 |
| 8 | [IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-knowledge-and-data-engineering.md) | 132 |
| 9 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 124 |
| 10 | [Finance research letters](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/finance-research-letters.md) | 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)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/scaled-dot-product-attention-transformer.md) | 69 |
| 2 | [Graph neural network (graph convolution)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/graph-neural-network-graph-convolution.md) | 65 |
| 3 | [Contrastive loss (InfoNCE)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/contrastive-loss-infonce.md) | 33 |
| 4 | [Convolutional neural network (CNN)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/convolutional-neural-network-cnn.md) | 31 |
| 5 | [Linear and integer programming](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/linear-and-integer-programming.md) | 27 |
| 6 | [Generative adversarial network (GAN)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/generative-adversarial-network-gan.md) | 24 |
| 7 | [Q-learning](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/q-learning.md) | 13 |
| 8 | [Variational autoencoder (ELBO)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/variational-autoencoder-elbo.md) | 12 |
| 9 | [Kullback-Leibler divergence](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/kullback-leibler-divergence.md) | 11 |
| 10 | [Long short-term memory (LSTM)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/long-short-term-memory-lstm.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2026.3657354) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pacfin.2026.103055) | [Pacific-Basin Finance Journal](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pacific-basin-finance-journal.md) | 2026-01-05 | Feng Hu, Huijie Yang, Shaobin Wei et al. |
| 3 | 53 | 6.0 | [Deep transfer learning for image classification: a survey](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-026-11491-z) | [Artificial Intelligence Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/artificial-intelligence-review.md) | 2026-01-29 | Jo Plested, Musa Phiri, Tom Gedeon |
| 4 | 52 | 5.6 | [A review of machine learning with small and limited data](https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537-025-01346-9) | [Journal Of Big Data](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/journal-of-big-data.md) | 2026-01-16 | M. Z. Naser |
| 5 | 49 | 5.2 | [Graph Transformers: A Survey](https://doi.org/10.1109/tnnls.2025.3646122) | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-025-11471-9) | [Artificial Intelligence Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/artificial-intelligence-review.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2026.131088) | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2026.104193) | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-025-02639-4) | [Knowledge and Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-and-information-systems.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-026-02740-3) | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 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

```bibtex
@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}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).