To analyze the research status of dental anxiety in the past ten years, explore the development trends, hot spots and trends in this field, and provide ideas and guidance for future research.

With the title " dental fear", " dental phobia" and " dental anxiety", the relevant literatures published by CNKI and Web of Science from January 1, 2011 to January 1, 2022 were retrieved.CiteSpace software was used to analyze the distribution of the countries, institutions and authors included in the literature and the key words in the cluster and order, and draw the corresponding evidence-based visual map.

A total of 480 literatures in Chinese and 752 in English were included, with the largest number of publications in 2019.In terms of countries and institutions, Sweden, Australia, the United Kingdom and other countries have published a large number of documents, while there was no cooperation and communication among the institutions in Chinese literature, showing obvious regionalism.Foreign authors publish more articles, and their cooperation was closer than that of our country.The results of English literature suggest that sedation and validity are the focus of foreign scholars, while the results of Chinese literature suggest that Chinese scholars pay more attention to pediatric dental anxiety.

The development of English literature on dental anxiety is more expansive and in-depth than that of Chinese literature. Virtual reality(VR) intervention, dental care, and the effectiveness of intervention measures are currently the research hotspots in the field of dental anxiety.

Dental fear; Citespace; Bibliometric analysis