The COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted public health and the worldwide economy. The overstretched operation of health systems around the world is accompanied by potential and ongoing environmental threats. At present, comprehensive scientific assessments of research on temporal changes in medical/pharmaceutical wastewater (MPWW), as well as estimations of researcher networks and scientific productivity are lacking. Therefore, we conducted a thorough literature study, using bibliometrics to reproduce research on medical wastewater over nearly half a century. Our primary goal is systematically to map the evolution of keyword clusters over time, and to obtain the structure and credibility of clusters. Our secondary objective was to measure research network performance (country, institution, and author) using CiteSpace and VOSviewer. We extracted 2306 papers published between 1981 and 2022. The co-cited reference network identified 16 clusters with well-structured networks (Q = 0.7716, S = 0.896). The main trends were as follows: 1) Early MPWW research prioritized sources of wastewater, and this cluster was considered to be the mainstream research frontier and direction, representing an important source and priority research area. 2) Mid-term research focused on characteristic contaminants and detection technologies. Particularly during 2000–2010, a period of rapid developments in global medical systems, pharmaceutical compounds (PhCs) in MPWW were recognized as a major threat to human health and the environment. 3) Recent research has focused on novel degradation technologies for PhC-containing MPWW, with high scores for research on biological methods. Wastewater-based epidemiology has emerged as being consistent with or predictive of the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases. Therefore, the application of MPWW in COVID-19 tracing will be of great interest to environmentalists. These results could guide the future direction of funding agencies and research groups.

COVID-19 大流行严重影响了公共卫生和全球经济。世界各地卫生系统的过度运作伴随着潜在和持续的环境威胁。目前，缺乏对医疗/制药废水时间变化（MPWW）研究的全面科学评估，以及对研究人员网络和科学生产力的估计。因此，我们进行了彻底的文献研究，利用文献计量学重现了近半个世纪以来关于医疗废水的研究。我们的主要目标是系统地绘制关键字簇随时间的演变，并获得簇的结构和可信度。我们的次要目标是使用 CiteSpace 和 VOSviewer 衡量研究网络性能（国家、机构和作者）。我们提取了 1981 年至 2022 年间发表的 2306 篇论文。共同被引的参考网络识别出 16 个具有结构良好网络的簇（Q = 0.7716，S = 0.896）。主要趋势如下：1）早期MPWW研究以废水源为重点，该集群被认为是主流研究前沿和方向，代表了重要的源头和优先研究领域。 2）中期研究重点是特征污染物及检测技术。特别是在2000-2010年全球医疗系统快速发展的时期，MPWW中的药物化合物（PhCs）被认为是对人类健康和环境的主要威胁。 3）近期研究主要集中在含PhC MPWW的新型降解技术上，生物方法研究得分较高。 基于废水的流行病学与确诊的 COVID-19 病例数量一致或可预测。因此，MPWW在COVID-19追踪中的应用将引起环保人士的极大兴趣。这些结果可以指导资助机构和研究小组的未来方向。