Abstract: In order to understand the current status, hotspots and development trend of aflatoxin research around the globe and to provide reference for scientific researchers and decision makers in relevant research fields, a bibliometric method was used to evaluate aflatoxin research papers from the Web of Science Core Collection Database published between 2003 and 2020. The results indicated that the number of global aflatoxin research papers had been increasing rapidly. The United States and China published the most papers and were active in interactional cooperation in aflatoxin research. Food Control was the journal that published the most papers in this field, and the largest proportion of papers was in food science and technology. Among individuals, Cotty P J, from the United States, took the first place in the world in terms of the number of publications and H-index. Only one paper published by Chinese scholars was among top 100 most cited papers in this field, suggesting that China lacks important research achievements with international impacts and there is still room to improve the originality and quality of papers. Moreover, the high-frequency keywords from publications in different periods and countries were also analyzed by cluster analysis and burst detection using VOSviewer and CiteSpace software. New detection techniques and efficient detoxification methods for aflatoxin, aflatoxin biocontrol and the regulatory mechanism of aflatoxin biosynthesis are likely to be research hotspots and frontiers in this field in the future.

Key words: aflatoxins; food contamination; bibliometrics; academic cooperation; keyword analysis; cluster analysis; burst detection