---
title: "Research in February 2026: top topics and papers"
description: "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)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2026-02
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2026-02.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "In February 2026, the tracked journals published 3,968 papers (finance 525, accounting 82, economics 912, management 464, operations research 482, AI 1,503)."
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 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.

## 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](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 525 |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | 82 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 912 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 464 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 482 |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 1,503 |

## Top keywords

*Most frequent keywords, February 2026*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [China](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/china.md) | 134 |
| 2 | [large language models](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/large-language-models.md) | 106 |
| 3 | [Chinese listed companies](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/chinese-listed-companies.md) | 89 |
| 4 | [corporate governance](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/corporate-governance.md) | 71 |
| 5 | [COVID-19 pandemic](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/covid-19-pandemic.md) | 68 |
| 6 | [financial constraints](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/financial-constraints.md) | 68 |
| 7 | [emerging markets](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/emerging-markets.md) | 61 |
| 8 | [multimodal fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/multimodal-fusion.md) | 52 |
| 9 | [contrastive learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/contrastive-learning.md) | 48 |
| 10 | [explainable AI](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/explainable-ai.md) | 46 |
| 11 | [digital transformation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/digital-transformation.md) | 45 |
| 12 | [graph neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/graph-neural-networks.md) | 43 |
| 13 | [artificial intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/artificial-intelligence.md) | 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](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/multimodal-fusion.md) | 52 | 32.9 | +19.1 |
| decarbonization | 26 | 9.9 | +16.1 |
| [explainable AI](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/explainable-ai.md) | 46 | 30.6 | +15.4 |
| [innovation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/innovation.md) | 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](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | China (50); COVID-19 pandemic (43); Chinese listed companies (42); corporate governance (31); financial constraints (31) |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | corporate governance (18); audit quality (7); ESG disclosure (5); financial constraints (5); earnings management (4) |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | China (63); Chinese listed companies (21); energy transition (21); financial constraints (21); decarbonization (18) |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | digital transformation (23); Chinese listed companies (21); moderating effect (19); dynamic capabilities (17); corporate social responsibility (15) |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | mixed-integer linear programming (18); makespan minimization (14); supply chain resilience (13); combinatorial optimization (11); demand uncertainty (11) |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 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](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 59 |
| 2 | Shanghai Jiao Tong University | 47 |
| 3 | [Tsinghua University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tsinghua-university.md) | 47 |
| 4 | [Xi'an Jiaotong University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/xi-an-jiaotong-university.md) | 47 |
| 5 | [Zhejiang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhejiang-university.md) | 45 |
| 6 | [Peking University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/peking-university.md) | 44 |
| 7 | [Hong Kong Polytechnic University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/hong-kong-polytechnic-university.md) | 43 |
| 8 | [Wuhan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/wuhan-university.md) | 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](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 390 |
| 2 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 181 |
| 3 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 170 |
| 4 | [Finance research letters](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/finance-research-letters.md) | 105 |
| 5 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 100 |
| 6 | [International Review of Economics & Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-review-of-economics-finance.md) | 88 |
| 7 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 77 |
| 8 | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 76 |
| 9 | [Energy Policy](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/energy-policy.md) | 75 |
| 10 | [Computers & Industrial Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/computers-industrial-engineering.md) | 67 |

## Equations and models

*Most-mentioned equations and models, February 2026 (titles, abstracts and keywords)*

| # | Equation or model | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Linear and integer programming](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/linear-and-integer-programming.md) | 34 |
| 2 | [Scaled dot-product attention (Transformer)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/scaled-dot-product-attention-transformer.md) | 19 |
| 3 | [Graph neural network (graph convolution)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/graph-neural-network-graph-convolution.md) | 15 |
| 4 | [Convolutional neural network (CNN)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/convolutional-neural-network-cnn.md) | 9 |
| 5 | [Contrastive loss (InfoNCE)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/contrastive-loss-infonce.md) | 8 |
| 6 | [Logistic regression (logit)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/logistic-regression-logit.md) | 7 |
| 7 | [Gradient descent](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/gradient-descent.md) | 5 |
| 8 | [Stackelberg game](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/stackelberg-game.md) | 5 |
| 9 | [Long short-term memory (LSTM)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/long-short-term-memory-lstm.md) | 4 |
| 10 | [Q-learning](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/q-learning.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2026.113208) | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-026-11504-x) | [Artificial Intelligence Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/artificial-intelligence-review.md) | 2026-02-10 | El‐Sayed M. El‐kenawy, Nima Khodadadi, Seyedali Mirjalili et al. |
| 3 | 76 | 8.8 | [Multimodal Alignment and Fusion: A Survey](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-025-02667-1) | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 2026-02-06 | Songtao Li, Hao Tang |
| 4 | 56 | 6.6 | [A visual-textual mutual guidance fusion network for remote sensing visual question answering](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2026.113258) | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2026.104248) | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2026.3660147) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2026.108756) | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1007/s42973-026-00235-x) | [Japanese Economic Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/japanese-economic-review.md) | 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](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2026.131552) | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 2026-02-09 | Zunyu Liu, Jiao Wang, Hao Wu et al. |
| 10 | 28 | 3.5 | [AI washing: Strategic disclosure and backlash](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.frl.2026.109684) | [Finance research letters](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/finance-research-letters.md) | 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

```bibtex
@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}
}
```

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