ObjectivesTo conduct a bibliometric analysis to research the status of disease burden domestically and overseas so as to understand the status of diseases burden, and to provide scientific and reasonable reference for health disease prevention, control strategies formulation and future research.MethodsPubMed, Web of Science, EMbase, The Cochrane Library, WanFang Data, CBM and CNKI databases were electronically searched to collect literature on disease burden from inception to October, 2018. Two reviewers independently screened literature and extracted data. EndNote X7 software was used for literature management, Excel 2016 software and VOS viewer software were also used to analyze data. Literature was classified by the aspects of literature publication characteristics, diseases, background areas, influencing factors, evaluation indicators and poverty caused by illness.ResultsA total of 325 studies were included in the bibliometric analysis. 41 articles (12.6%) were published in journals indexed by SCIE; original research evidence accounted for 97.0% (315 articles); 272 articles were from China (83.7%). The main diseases involved were malignant tumors (58 articles, 17.8%), diabetes (29 articles, 8.9%) and hypertension (24 articles, 7.4%). Factors affecting the disease burden primarily included hospitalization days (9 articles, 2.8%), complications (5 articles, 1.5%), delays in treatment (5 articles, 1.5%), and economic income (4 articles, 1.2%). Sixity-one articles (18.8%) reported poverty due to illness, and related diseases were chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (12 articles, 3.7%), hypertension (10 articles, 3.1%), diabetes (10 articles, 3.1%), malignant tumors (9 articles, 2.8%) and hepatitis B (6 articles, 1.8%).ConclusionsAt present, the disease burden research are focusing more on the burden of chronic non-communicable diseases such as malignant tumors, hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases in developing countries and regions. Medical costs vary from different diseases and treatment, different demographic characteristics of patients, and the coverage medical security of different population are the primary reasons for the " expensive in medical treatment” of current residents and the heavy burden of disease. DALY and total direct medical expenses are the main evaluation indexes of epidemiological burden and economic burden of disease, respectively. Future researches should focus on strengthening the scientific nature of study design to improve the quality of research, as well as paying more attention to diseases and aspects that are rarely involved, such as major diseases caused by poverty due to illness, comprehensive analysis of multiple diseases and aspects of health investment measurement, and comprehensively use the evaluation indicators of disease burden to strengthen the research on the comparability index of disease economic burden.