Mapping 25 years of forensic and legal medicine research: a multi-database bibliometric and science-mapping analysis (2000–2025)

Background: Forensic and legal medicine spans forensic pathology, clinical forensic practice, toxicology, genetics, imaging, and emerging digital methods. Long-horizon mapping can support research prioritisation and editorial strategy. Methods: We conducted performance analysis and science-mapping of records published between 2000 and 2025. Primary analyses were performed on Web of Science Core Collection records (articles and reviews) using bibliometrix/biblioshiny. Outputs included annual production, leading sources and countries, citation indicators, collaboration metrics, keyword co-occurrence, Callon centrality–density thematic mapping, and trend-topic analysis. A conservative, prespecified keyword harmonisation was applied to a small set of orthographic variants (medico-legal, postmortem, machine learning, deep learning). Scopus-derived outputs were used as a robustness comparison for source and country landscapes. Results: The WoS corpus comprised 16,190 documents from 3052 sources with 49,746 distinct authors and 372,874 cited references. Annual growth was 7.68%, with 5.07 co-authors per document and 13.38% international co-authorship. Output was concentrated in a compact Bradford nucleus of specialist forensic journals, while a long tail of occasional publications appeared in adjacent clinical and multidisciplinary venues. Thematic mapping identified four macro-domains—identification, risk/epidemiology, autopsy/postmortem pathology, and clinical forensic practice—with recent growth in COVID-19-related work, postmortem interval research, and AI/ML terminology. Conclusions: Forensic and legal medicine shows sustained growth with a stable conceptual backbone and accelerating innovation in digital and computational themes. These maps can inform research prioritisation, training needs, and editorial planning across specialist forensic outlets.