BACKGROUND: There are numerous publications on cancer vocational rehabilitation, visual techniques can help medical researchers and social workers be more familiar with the state of this field. OBJECTIVE: To summarize cancer vocational rehabilitation research, we applied visualized and bibliometric analysis to enable medical workers and social workers to identify evolving patterns of knowledge among articles and research trends, understand the current research status of vocational rehabilitation of cancer, and carry out further research on hot topics. METHODS: Based on a review of 933 papers on cancer vocational rehabilitation published in the Web of Science Core Collection, this study used Citespace software to systematically and objectively describe cancer vocational rehabilitation. RESULTS: Since 2003, the field of cancer vocational rehabilitation began to sprout. The most published and most cited country, institution, author and cited journal were the United States, University of Amsterdam, Angela G. E. M. de Boer, and Psycho-Oncology, respectively. The three most frequently cited keywords were breast cancer, quality of life and cancer survivor. The three keywords with the largest spike in citations were cohort, absence and symptom. Conducting randomized controlled trials or prospective cohort studies to help cancer survivors return to work, and using qualitative methods to understand the vocational rehabilitation experiences or perceptions of cancer survivors or medical staff are hotspots in this field. CONCLUSIONS: Cancer vocational rehabilitation has attracted the attention of researchers all over the world. Future studies may focus on other cancer types and explore more high quality interventions.