Objective  To quickly understand and master the characteristics of occupational health research by information visualization.

  Methods  Taking CNKI as the literature source, and excluding non-academic literatures, the Chinese literatures of occupational health during 2015-2020 were collected, according to the key words as "occupational health", "labor health", "industrial health", "occupational disease", "workplace", "occupational protection" and "occupational hazard". The annual distribution characteristics of the number of published papers, authors and institutions were analyzed, and the visualization tool VOSviewer was used for exhibition of co-occurrence pattern.

  Results  Totally 10 572 effective literatures were obtained during this period. Since 2015, the number of published papers on occupational health showed a downward trend. The number of papers published in 2020 decreased by 35.79% compared with that in 2015. The main force of occupational health research was distributed in some industrial clustering areas. The current research mainly focuses on the investigation on occupational hazards, occupational protection of medical personnel, evaluation of occupational hazards, diagnosis of occupational diseases, trend analysis of occupational diseases, and detection of occupational hazards. Occupational health examination was the research hot spot in recent years.

  Conclusions  The detection and evaluation of occupational hazards was the most concerned topic in occupational health research for a long time. However, the research content was relatively fixed, and the discipline was insufficient in-depth, expansion and intersection. Therefore, it should be gradually expanded to focus on the health affecting factors among various occupational groups.