Research published in February 2026

What the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals published in February 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 February 2026, the tracked journals published 3,968 papers (finance 525, accounting 82, economics 912, management 464, operations research 482, AI 1,503).
The most frequent keywords were “China” (134), “large language models” (106) and “Chinese listed companies” (89).
Compared with their share in the twelve months before, the keywords that grew most were “vision-language models” (38 papers, +20), “multimodal fusion” (52 papers, +19) and “decarbonization” (26 papers, +16).
The institutions with the most papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (59), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (47) and Tsinghua University (47).
China was involved in 45% of the papers.
The most-cited paper published that month is “RFAConv: Receptive-field attention convolution for improving convolutional neural networks” (Pattern Recognition), with 122 citations so far.

Papers by category#

Papers published in February 2026
Category	Papers
Finance	525
Accounting	82
Economics	912
Management	464
Operations Research	482
AI	1,503

Top keywords#

Most frequent keywords, February 2026
#	Keyword	Papers
1	China	134
2	large language models	106
3	Chinese listed companies	89
4	corporate governance	71
5	COVID-19 pandemic	68
6	financial constraints	68
7	emerging markets	61
8	multimodal fusion	52
9	contrastive learning	48
10	explainable AI	46
11	digital transformation	45
12	graph neural networks	43
13	artificial intelligence	40
14	vision-language models	38
15	interpretability	36

Growing keywords#

Papers in February 2026 beyond the keyword's share in the twelve months before
Keyword	Papers	At earlier share	Extra papers
vision-language models	38	18.0	+20.0
multimodal fusion	52	32.9	+19.1
decarbonization	26	9.9	+16.1
explainable AI	46	30.6	+15.4
innovation	31	19.2	+11.8
systemic risk	29	18.0	+11.0
data heterogeneity	20	9.2	+10.8
CLIP	22	12.3	+9.7
cross-attention	23	13.5	+9.5
human-AI interaction	14	4.8	+9.2

Top keywords by category#

The five most frequent keywords per category, February 2026
Category	Most frequent keywords
Finance	China (50); COVID-19 pandemic (43); Chinese listed companies (42); corporate governance (31); financial constraints (31)
Accounting	corporate governance (18); audit quality (7); ESG disclosure (5); financial constraints (5); earnings management (4)
Economics	China (63); Chinese listed companies (21); energy transition (21); financial constraints (21); decarbonization (18)
Management	digital transformation (23); Chinese listed companies (21); moderating effect (19); dynamic capabilities (17); corporate social responsibility (15)
Operations Research	mixed-integer linear programming (18); makespan minimization (14); supply chain resilience (13); combinatorial optimization (11); demand uncertainty (11)
AI	large language models (84); multimodal fusion (51); contrastive learning (45); graph neural networks (40); explainable AI (36)

Institutions#

Institutions with the most papers, February 2026
#	Institution	Papers
1	Chinese Academy of Sciences	59
2	Shanghai Jiao Tong University	47
3	Tsinghua University	47
4	Xi'an Jiaotong University	47
5	Zhejiang University	45
6	Peking University	44
7	Hong Kong Polytechnic University	43
8	Wuhan University	43
9	Sun Yat-sen University	40
10	Harbin Institute of Technology	39

Countries#

Countries, February 2026
#	Country	Papers
1	China	1,787
2	United States	639
3	United Kingdom	330
4	Italy	179
5	Australia	175
6	Germany	173
7	France	152
8	India	147
9	Hong Kong	145
10	South Korea	120

Journals#

Journals with the most papers, February 2026
#	Journal	Papers
1	Expert Systems with Applications	390
2	Knowledge-Based Systems	181
3	Pattern Recognition	170
4	Finance research letters	105
5	Neural Networks	100
6	International Review of Economics & Finance	88
7	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	77
8	Neural Computing and Applications	76
9	Energy Policy	75
10	Computers & Industrial Engineering	67

Equations and models#

Most-mentioned equations and models, February 2026 (titles, abstracts and keywords)
#	Equation or model	Papers
1	Linear and integer programming	34
2	Scaled dot-product attention (Transformer)	19
3	Graph neural network (graph convolution)	15
4	Convolutional neural network (CNN)	9
5	Contrastive loss (InfoNCE)	8
6	Logistic regression (logit)	7
7	Gradient descent	5
8	Stackelberg game	5
9	Long short-term memory (LSTM)	4
10	Q-learning	4

Datasets#

Most-mentioned datasets, February 2026 (titles, abstracts and keywords)
#	Dataset	Papers
1	ImageNet	8
2	CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100	4
3	MNIST / Fashion-MNIST	3
4	MS COCO	3
5	YouTube / TikTok	3
6	NASA C-MAPSS turbofan data	2
7	American Community Survey	1
8	Cora / CiteSeer / PubMed (Planetoid)	1
9	Domain adaptation benchmarks (Office-31, Office-Home, VisDA, DomainNet)	1
10	Euro Stoxx / DAX	1

Most-cited papers published in February 2026#

Most-cited papers published in February 2026 (citations counted by OpenAlex, updated daily)
#	Citations	Per month	Title	Journal	Published	Authors
1	122	14.1	RFAConv: Receptive-field attention convolution for improving convolutional neural networks	Pattern Recognition	2026-02-05	Xin Zhang, Chen Liu, Tingting Song et al.
2	105	12.4	Glider snake optimizer (GSO): a nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm for global and engineering optimization problems	Artificial Intelligence Review	2026-02-10	El‐Sayed M. El‐kenawy, Nima Khodadadi, Seyedali Mirjalili et al.
3	76	8.8	Multimodal Alignment and Fusion: A Survey	International Journal of Computer Vision	2026-02-06	Songtao Li, Hao Tang
4	56	6.6	A visual-textual mutual guidance fusion network for remote sensing visual question answering	Pattern Recognition	2026-02-10	Haolin Liu, Libin Chen, Xinchao Lu et al.
5	56	6.8	Frequency domain-enhanced spectral-spatial fusion transformer for semantic segmentation of remote sensing images	Information Fusion	2026-02-19	Xin Li, Feng Xu, Jiaxin Li et al.
6	51	5.8	Jailbreak and Guard Aligned Language Models With Only Few In-Context Demonstrations	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2026-02-02	Zeming Wei, Yue Wang, Ang Li et al.
7	43	5.4	DADiffNet: Delay-aware diffusion networks with adaptive subgraphs for large scale traffic forecasting	Neural Networks	2026-02-27	Yujie Fan, Jing M. Chen, Wenqiang Xu et al.
8	40	4.6	Interpreting event-studies from recent difference-in-differences methods	Japanese Economic Review	2026-02-03	Jonathan Roth
9	28	3.3	Water-aware real-time detection of floating plastic debris via an enhanced YOLOv13 framework for aquatic pollution monitoring	Expert Systems with Applications	2026-02-09	Zunyu Liu, Jiao Wang, Hao Wu et al.
10	28	3.5	AI washing: Strategic disclosure and backlash	Finance research letters	2026-02-25	Xiapeng Song, Wenxuan Hou, Zizhou Ouyang et al.

Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Research published in February 2026. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 26, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2026-02

@misc{scholar4ai-reports-2026-02,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Research published in February 2026},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2026-02}},
  urldate = {2026-10-26},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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