Clinical Risk Management and Patient-safety Research: A Large-scale Bibliometric Mapping of the Field and Its Emerging Directions (Master vs. 2021-2025)

BACKGROUND: To map the evolution, knowledge structure, and emerging directions of clinical risk management (CRM) and patient-safety research by contrasting a full-timespan corpus with the most recent 5-year subset. METHODS: Records were retrieved from Web of Science Core Collection (n=23,498; 1986-2026) and Scopus (n=51,710; 1958-2026) using harmonized queries targeting patient safety, adverse events, medical error, medication safety, and CRM tools in health care settings. We performed descriptive bibliometrics and science mapping (co-word analysis of author keywords; country collaboration) and used the WoS cited-reference field for citation-based intellectual-structure analyses. Master outputs were compared with 2021 to 2025 (WoS n=10,245; Scopus n=21,299), with selected visualizations on a deduplicated WoS+Scopus data set (master n=55,722; 2021-2025 n=22,782). RESULTS: The 2021 to 2025 window accounted for 43.6% of the WoS corpus and 41.2% of the Scopus corpus. Core sources included dedicated patient-safety outlets and leading quality-and-safety journals; in the recent subset, pharmacovigilance journals emerged more prominently, reflecting medication-safety terminology. Recurrent themes encompassed safety culture and climate, adverse-event detection, incident reporting and learning systems, and proactive and reactive CRM tools (checklists, root cause analysis, HFMEA). Relative prominence increased for COVID-19 and data-driven methods (AI/machine learning) in 2021 to 2025. CONCLUSIONS: Within the published literature, CRM and patient-safety research now forms a multi-cluster knowledge base linking culture, measurement, improvement, and technology-enabled surveillance. These bibliometric patterns describe research activity and field structure rather than adoption in practice or changes in patient outcomes, and should inform research prioritization and safety governance accordingly.