A comparative analysis on risk communication between international and Chinese literature from the perspective of knowledge domain visualization

BACKGROUND: The outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) severely damaged and endangered people’s lives at the end of 2019. Risk communication plays an important role in the response to it successfully, which has been appreciated by the World Health Organization. Therefore, a comprehensive analysis of risk communication research is necessary, which can understand current research hotspots and reveal new trends. METHODS: In this study, we collected 1134 international articles from the Web of Science database and 3983 Chinese articles from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure database. Bibliometric and mapping knowledge domain analysis methods were used for temporal distribution analysis, cooperation network analysis, co-word network analysis, and burst detection analysis. RESULTS: The first article in this field was published by western scholars earlier, while the first Chinese article in 2002. Research institutions mainly come from universities. The USA plays a key role in this field. Chinese scholars had a closer cooperation network, but there was less cooperation among domestic institutions. Risk perception, trust, risk management, and risk information had always been the research hotspots in this academic. Trust, sentiment research, and public risk events were essential directions for the future. There are 25 burst words for international articles, while 11 burst words for Chinese articles from 2000 to 2020. CONCLUSIONS: In summary, both domestic and international researchers are concerned about risk communication, risk perception, trust, and risk information. International research on risk communication is systematic and comprehensive relatively. However, Chinese scholars take severe acute respiratory syndrome as the research background and reviewing foreign knowledge as the research starting point. With the purpose of practical and applied research based on a public emergency, the risk communication research lacks continuity in Chinese academy in the past years. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12199-021-00981-x.