[Advances, hotspot analysis, and prospects in global research on heat-related illness: a bibliometric analysis based on CiteSpace].

Objective

To analyze the current global research status and hotspots of heat-related illness, and to explore the future development trends.

Methods

In January 2025, the Web of Science Core Collection database was used as the literature search source to retrieve literature on the research field of heat-related illnesses. The CiteSpace 6.4.1 software was used to conduct visual analysis on the distribution of countries that published papers, keyword co-occurrence, and keyword clustering.

Results

A total of 2671 relevant English papers were retrieved, with 2134 ultimately included. The global research in this field showed an overall upward trend, with the top three countries in terms of publication volume being the United States (937 papers), China (299 papers), and Japan (193 papers). The high-frequency core keywords in this field were "heat stroke", "temperature", "heat stress", "exercise", "mortality", and "climate change". Cluster analysis revealed that heat stroke, thermoregulation, climate change, exertional heat stroke, and heat exhaustion were the primary research clusters.

Conclusion

The future research direction of heat-related illnesses may focus on the tissue and organ damage caused by heat stress, particularly the exploration of liver injury and multi-system pathological mechanisms.