Objective  To investigate the research focuses and developmental trends of deceased organ donation by visualization analyzed in English literatures data from 2006 to 2016.

  Methods  The research strength, high impact authors, core journals, high frequency keywords and burst terms related to deceased organ donation from the Web of Science database were statistically analyzed by using CiteSpace.

  Results  A total of 1 278 relevant literatures revealed that the research strength was mainly distributed in the United States with a total quantity of 497 papers, accounting for 28% of the total quantity from 2006 to 2016. Both Ploeg RJ and Parrilla P published 14 papers. The papers written by Kootstra G were the most cited for 192 times. The papers published in Am J Transplant were cited for 917 times. The high frequency keywords included organ donation, transplantation, donation, etc. The high frequency burst terms included waiting-list, beating donor, donor-kidneys, etc.

  Conclusions  In recent decade, the research highlights of deceased organ donation mainly include survival rate of transplantation with donation after cardiac death, prognosis of transplantation with deceased organ donation and preservation techniques of donor organ in deceased organ donation, etc. The research frontiers focus on deceased organ donation rates, the source of donor organ, standard and extended standard of deceased organ donation, etc.