The bibliomrtrics was used to show the status and hot spots of domestic and foreign literature, original research and the second data analysis about critical care medicine.providing a reference for further research.

We systematically searched the papers about critical care medicine from Pubmed, Web of science, Wanfang, VIP, CNKI and CBM database from Jan 1, 1970 to Sep 1, 2017. Excel 2013 was used to extract the basic information. Ucinet 6.0 was used to analyze the collaborations among countries, and HistCite 12.03 was used to conduct time series analysis.

A total of 353 882 articles were involved, including 1963 meta-analyses. Literatures showed an upward trend year by year, while the rising trend of domestic literature was mainly concentrated from 2005 to 2017. The articles mainly attribute to Europe and the United States. The country with maximum number of publications is USA, whereas the University of Toronto rank first according to the article amount roll. The domestic meta analysis has ranked fourth in the world, but the number of original researches is few and the institutions are scattered. Studies from abroad mainly focus on mechanical ventilation and sepsis, while they focus on pancreatitis in China.

In the past 50 years, studies about critical care medicine have been increasing year by year which are the hot spot in current medical research. European and American countries are in a dominant position. The level of research in critical care medicine in China is far from that in foreign countries, including the number of documents, the performance of original research, and the lack of cooperation with other countries.