IntroductionAfrican swine fever (ASF) is a contagious viral disease that can have devastating effects on domestic pigs and wild boars. Over the past decade, there has been a new wave of this ancient disease spreading around the world, prompting many scholars to dedicate themselves to researching this disease. This research aims to use bibliometric methods to organize, analyze and summarize the scientific publications on ASF that have been amassed in the past two decades.MethodsThis paper used VOSviewer, CiteSpace, and a bibliometric online analysis platform to conduct performance analysis and visualization studies on 1,885 academic papers about ASF in the Web of Science from January 2003 to December 2022.ResultsThe amount of literature published on ASF has increased exponentially in recent years, and the development trend of related research is good. A group of representative scholars have appeared in this research field, and some cooperative networks have been formed.TransboundaryandEmerging Diseasesis the journal with the most publications in this field, whileVirus Researchis the journal with the most citation per article. High-productivity countries are led by China in terms of the number of articles published followed by the United States and Spain. In regard to the average number of citations, the scholars in the UK are in the lead. The institution with the most articles was the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The analysis of high-frequency keywords showed that the pathogens and epidemiology of ASF were the research hotspots in this field, and the research content was closely related to molecular biology and immunology. The burst keywords “transmission”, “identification”, “virulence”, “replication”, and “gene” reflects the research frontier. In addition, by collating and analyzing highly cited journals and highly co-cited references, we explored the knowledge structure and theoretical basis of this field.DiscussionThis is the first bibliometric analysis report on ASF research, which highlights the key characteristics of ASF research and presents the research status and evolution trend in this field from a new perspective. It provides a valuable reference for further research.