---
title: "Research in May 2026: top topics and papers"
description: "In May 2026, the tracked journals published 4,201 papers (finance 605, accounting 78, economics 844, management 473, operations research 554, AI 1,647). The most frequent keywords were “large language models” (140), “China” (120) and “Chinese listed companies” (89)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2026-05
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2026-05.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "In May 2026, the tracked journals published 4,201 papers (finance 605, accounting 78, economics 844, management 473, operations research 554, AI 1,647)."
data_url: https://scholar4ai.com/data/rankings.json
updated: 2026-10-26T14:52:47+09:00
window: 2026-09-27 to 2026-10-26
source: OpenAlex (CC0)
---

# Research published in May 2026

What the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals published in May 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 May 2026, the tracked journals published 4,201 papers (finance 605, accounting 78, economics 844, management 473, operations research 554, AI 1,647).
- The most frequent keywords were “large language models” (140), “China” (120) and “Chinese listed companies” (89).
- Compared with their share in the twelve months before, the keywords that grew most were “knowledge distillation” (52 papers, +21), “AI governance” (24 papers, +14) and “Mamba” (33 papers, +13).
- The institutions with the most papers were Tsinghua University (61), Chinese Academy of Sciences (60) and Hong Kong Polytechnic University (56).
- China was involved in 46% of the papers.
- The most-cited paper published that month is “Deep Time Series Models: A Comprehensive Survey and Benchmark” (IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence), with 56 citations so far.

## Papers by category

*Papers published in May 2026*

| Category | Papers |
|---|---:|
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 605 |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | 78 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 844 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 473 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 554 |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 1,647 |

## Top keywords

*Most frequent keywords, May 2026*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [large language models](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/large-language-models.md) | 140 |
| 2 | [China](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/china.md) | 120 |
| 3 | [Chinese listed companies](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/chinese-listed-companies.md) | 89 |
| 4 | [financial constraints](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/financial-constraints.md) | 66 |
| 5 | [corporate governance](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/corporate-governance.md) | 57 |
| 6 | [emerging markets](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/emerging-markets.md) | 56 |
| 7 | [information asymmetry](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/information-asymmetry.md) | 56 |
| 8 | [graph neural networks](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/graph-neural-networks.md) | 53 |
| 9 | [COVID-19 pandemic](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/covid-19-pandemic.md) | 52 |
| 10 | [knowledge distillation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/knowledge-distillation.md) | 52 |
| 11 | class imbalance | 49 |
| 12 | [multimodal fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/multimodal-fusion.md) | 48 |
| 13 | [digital transformation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/digital-transformation.md) | 47 |
| 14 | [explainable AI](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/explainable-ai.md) | 46 |
| 15 | [contrastive learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/contrastive-learning.md) | 45 |

## Growing keywords

*Papers in May 2026 beyond the keyword's share in the twelve months before*

| Keyword | Papers | At earlier share | Extra papers |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| [knowledge distillation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/knowledge-distillation.md) | 52 | 31.0 | +21.0 |
| AI governance | 24 | 9.7 | +14.3 |
| Mamba | 33 | 19.7 | +13.3 |
| hallucination mitigation | 18 | 7.1 | +10.9 |
| edge deployment | 14 | 4.3 | +9.7 |
| transition economies | 11 | 1.7 | +9.3 |
| dynamic capabilities | 26 | 17.0 | +9.0 |
| carbon pricing | 21 | 12.9 | +8.1 |
| OECD countries | 13 | 5.1 | +7.9 |
| ESG ratings | 19 | 11.4 | +7.6 |

## Top keywords by category

*The five most frequent keywords per category, May 2026*

| Category | Most frequent keywords |
|---|---|
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | Chinese listed companies (64); China (54); financial constraints (44); information asymmetry (36); corporate governance (29) |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | corporate governance (13); accounting education (4); audit fees (4); state-owned enterprises (4); sustainability reporting (4) |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | China (52); energy transition (21); COVID-19 pandemic (18); developing countries (18); economic growth (17) |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | digital transformation (22); dynamic capabilities (21); purchase intention (15); consumer behavior (13); green innovation (13) |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | mixed-integer linear programming (22); multi-objective optimization (17); bi-level optimization (11); demand uncertainty (11); makespan minimization (11) |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | large language models (120); graph neural networks (52); knowledge distillation (52); multimodal fusion (45); class imbalance (44) |

## Institutions

*Institutions with the most papers, May 2026*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Tsinghua University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tsinghua-university.md) | 61 |
| 2 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 60 |
| 3 | [Hong Kong Polytechnic University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/hong-kong-polytechnic-university.md) | 56 |
| 4 | [Peking University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/peking-university.md) | 50 |
| 5 | [Zhejiang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhejiang-university.md) | 50 |
| 6 | Harbin Institute of Technology | 49 |
| 7 | [Tongji University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tongji-university.md) | 47 |
| 8 | [Beihang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/beihang-university.md) | 46 |
| 9 | National University of Singapore | 46 |
| 10 | Shanghai Jiao Tong University | 46 |

## Countries

*Countries, May 2026*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 1,920 |
| 2 | United States | 599 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 312 |
| 4 | Italy | 200 |
| 5 | Germany | 176 |
| 6 | Australia | 166 |
| 7 | India | 161 |
| 8 | France | 159 |
| 9 | Hong Kong | 155 |
| 10 | South Korea | 136 |

## Journals

*Journals with the most papers, May 2026*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 368 |
| 2 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 205 |
| 3 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 199 |
| 4 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 135 |
| 5 | [International Review of Economics & Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-review-of-economics-finance.md) | 122 |
| 6 | [Finance research letters](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/finance-research-letters.md) | 118 |
| 7 | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 94 |
| 8 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 89 |
| 9 | [Information Processing & Management](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-processing-management.md) | 73 |
| 10 | [Computers & Industrial Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/computers-industrial-engineering.md) | 64 |

## Equations and models

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

| # | Equation or model | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Linear and integer programming](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/linear-and-integer-programming.md) | 23 |
| 2 | [Scaled dot-product attention (Transformer)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/scaled-dot-product-attention-transformer.md) | 18 |
| 3 | [Graph neural network (graph convolution)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/graph-neural-network-graph-convolution.md) | 13 |
| 4 | [Contrastive loss (InfoNCE)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/contrastive-loss-infonce.md) | 10 |
| 5 | [Nash equilibrium](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/nash-equilibrium.md) | 6 |
| 6 | [Convolutional neural network (CNN)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/convolutional-neural-network-cnn.md) | 5 |
| 7 | [Principal component analysis (PCA)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/principal-component-analysis-pca.md) | 5 |
| 8 | [Gated recurrent unit (GRU)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/gated-recurrent-unit-gru.md) | 4 |
| 9 | [Generative adversarial network (GAN)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/generative-adversarial-network-gan.md) | 4 |
| 10 | [Proximal policy optimization (PPO)](https://scholar4ai.com/equations/proximal-policy-optimization-ppo.md) | 4 |

## Datasets

*Most-mentioned datasets, May 2026 (titles, abstracts and keywords)*

| # | Dataset | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | ImageNet | 5 |
| 2 | CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100 | 3 |
| 3 | MS COCO | 3 |
| 4 | YouTube / TikTok | 3 |
| 5 | nuScenes / Waymo Open / Argoverse | 2 |
| 6 | Taobao / Tmall / JD.com | 2 |
| 7 | 10-K filings | 1 |
| 8 | Action recognition (Kinetics, UCF101, HMDB51) | 1 |
| 9 | ADE20K | 1 |
| 10 | Airbnb | 1 |

## Most-cited papers published in May 2026

*Most-cited papers published in May 2026 (citations counted by OpenAlex, updated daily)*

| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 56 | 9.9 | [Deep Time Series Models: A Comprehensive Survey and Benchmark](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2026.3690845) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2026-05-06 | Yuxuan Wang, Haixu Wu, Jiaxiang Dong et al. |
| 2 | 55 | 9.4 | [Multimodal fusion on low-quality data: A comprehensive survey](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2026.104437) | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 2026-05-01 | Qingyang Zhang, Yake Wei, Zongbo Han et al. |
| 3 | 30 | 5.6 | [DFBSNet: Dual frequency-domain branch fusion and selection network for hyperspectral anomaly detection](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2026.113967) | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 2026-05-16 | Yiming Yao, Qing Wang, Dong Zhao et al. |
| 4 | 24 | 4.2 | [Dataset Distillation via a Noise-Unconstrained Generative Model](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2026.3690778) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2026-05-06 | Jingxuan Zhang, Lei Dai, Fei Ye et al. |
| 5 | 21 | 3.7 | [Urban cooling effects of China’ s low-carbon city policy: Causal evidence from satellite-derived urban heat islands](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115351) | [Energy Policy](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/energy-policy.md) | 2026-05-07 | Haoxiang Zhao, Jiawei Liu, Tingting Bai et al. |
| 6 | 20 | 3.8 | [Study of the co-evolution of heterogeneous policy combinations with AI-driven carbon emission monitoring and dynamic carbon trading mechanisms](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2026.124736) | [Technological Forecasting and Social Change](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/technological-forecasting-and-social-change.md) | 2026-05-20 | Y J Li, Guofu Li, Sarah Yvonne Cooper et al. |
| 7 | 16 | 3.0 | [Multi-source heterogeneous data-driven interpretable model based on transformer and kolmogorov-arnold networks for streamflow prediction](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2026.132862) | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 2026-05-14 | Cheng Ding, Zhaocai Wang, Zuowen Tan et al. |
| 8 | 16 | 3.2 | [Renewable energy consumption forecasting using the Swordfish movement optimization algorithm (SMOA) for feature selection and hyperparameter tuning](https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-026-11964-w) | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 2026-05-29 | Marwa M. Eid |
| 9 | 15 | 2.7 | [EchoSR: Efficient context harnessing for lightweight image super-resolution](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2026.104471) | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 2026-05-08 | Hanli Zhao, Binhao Wang, Shihao Zhao et al. |
| 10 | 15 | 2.9 | [Mixture of disentangled experts with missing modalities for robust multimodal sentiment analysis](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2026.104495) | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 2026-05-22 | Xiang Li, Xiaoming Zhang, Dezhuang Miao et al. |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Research published in May 2026. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 26, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2026-05

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-reports-2026-05,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Research published in May 2026},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/reports/2026-05}},
  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/).