Objective To explore the research status, hot spots and future development trend of prone positioning ventilation (PPV) through the analysis of visual knowledge map.

Methods Literaturesrelated to prone position ventilation in Web of Science (WOS) database were collected, and visual analysis was performed on the characteristics (the number of articles, authors, institutions, countries), keywords and other data of literatures by using VOSviewer 1.6.16 and CiteSpace 5.8.R3.

Results A total of 845 eligible articles were retrieved. Analysis showed that authors who published the most articles were GUéRIN C, ANTONIO P and GATTINONI L, etc. The main research institutions were the University of Toronto in Canada, the University of Milan in Italy and the University of Bicocca in Milan. The top three countries in the volume of documents were the United States, France and Italy. The three keywords with the highest frequency were "ARDS", "prone position" and "mechanical position", and the highest emergence intensity were "randomized controlled trial" and "care".

Conclusion At present, PPV is still mainly used for the treatment of ARDS in the world. In the future, the research trend in this field will mainly focus on the selection of ventilation mode, standardized guidelines, nursing measures in prone position, complications and efficacy evaluation.