Abstract Blockchain has received global concern as a research focus in recent years. It is a decentralized and unreliably distributed database technology. Numerous countries and researchers have successively applied blockchain in various fields. CiteSpace and VOSviewer were adopted as bibliometric analysis tools in this paper to obtain a comprehensive overview of blockchain technology and grasp the current research emphasis. The Web of Science core collection database was used as the primary source for data collection. The data were collected from 3826 articles published from 2013 to 2020. Specifically, the publication trends and categories might throw light on the development trends and current domains in terms of blockchain research. The most influential and productive authors, institutions, countries, and journals were involved in this bibliometric analysis. Theoretical knowledge and hot research topics on blockchain mainly ranged over “smart contract”, “bitcoin”, “security”, “ethereum”, and “cryptography”. A cluster analysis from the keyword perspective was carried out to obtain emerging trends and frontiers of blockchain. The results showed that future research should concentrate on management, blockchain technology, energy, machine learning, and smart home. Therefore, this paper assisted scholars and practitioners in getting a comprehensive understanding of the status quo and trends of blockchain research.