To analyze the related researches on big data applied in nursing at home and abroad, and to explore its application status and development trends, in order to provide a reference for the development of nursing big data in China.

Related articals of nursing big data collected from China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) , Wanfang database and Web of Science Core Collection were used as data sources. The search time limit was from the establishment of the database to September 30, 2019. Excel was used for statistical analysis of the year, country, institution and journal. VOSviewer was used for co-occurrence analysis of keywords and national cooperation, and draw visual graphs.

A total of 195 Chinese articals and 5 751 English articals were included. From 2001 to 2019, the research on nursing big data showed an overall growth trend. There were few related research in China with scattered research institutions, which were mainly published in nursing journals. The English articals on nursing big data mainly involved five fields, including health management, assessment and prediction, data mining technology, data analysis and cloud computing, and big data research platform; while Chinese articals mainly covered three fields, including information nursing, nursing quality management and application types of big data. The United States was at the center of national cooperation and dominated this field.

The research on nursing big data in China is still in its infancy, and the research content is not focused enough. It can be further explored in standardizing nursing standard terms, building a diversified data monitoring platform and improving the information literacy of nursing staff, so as to accelerate the clinical application of nursing big data in China, and then provide accurate nursing services for patients.

Bibliometrics; Nursing; Big data; Visualization analysis