To analyze the research hotspots and development trends of the concept of 'ferroptosis’ in the context of sepsis, as well as the cooperation and exchange between countries, authors and institutions.

We used the method of bibliometrics to analyze the keywords, countries and institutions, authors, literature co-citation and other information of ferroptosis research in the field of sepsis from multiple perspectives with the help of CiteSpace, VOSviewer, RStudio, Excel and other software, and showed it in the form of knowledge map.

A total of 324 articles and 1378 keywords were collected in the core collection of Web of Science. The top five countries in terms of the number of publications were China, the United States, Germany, Thailand, and France. The top three keywords were inflammation, oxidative stress and acute lung injury. All keywords clustering modularity Q value was 0.7483, and Silhouette S value was 0.9067; the most time-dependent keyword was 'iron overload’, and the recent hot keywords were 'autophagy’, 'septic shock’ and 'inflammation’. In the literature co-citation analysis, the Dixon and Stockwell teams had the highest citation rate. According to the analysis of countries and institutions, China and the United States had the highest research heat in this field; the journal with the highest number of citations was 'Free Radical Biology and Medicine’, the journal with the highest link strength between journals was 'Frontiers in Immunology’, and the journal with the highest number of publications was 'International Immunopharmacology’.

The research hotspots of sepsis-related ferroptosis are to inhibit the occurrence of ferroptosis, circulatory system dysfunction, organ damage and protection, inflammatory response, oxidative stress, etc. In this field, China and the United States have the largest academic influence and the gap is narrowing. However, the domestic and international cooperation network of Chinese scientific research institutions has not yet been established, and efforts need to continue to explore new ways of interdisciplinary and inter-institutional cooperation.