The training of targeted admission medical students (TAMS) is an important measure to alleviate the shortage of primary care physicians and to improve the overall quality and level of primary care workforce in rural China.

To explore the recent hot topics, present and future trends in the research on TAMS in China, so that a solid theoretical foundation can be laid for future studies.

All articles about the training of TAMS published from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2021 in three databases (i.e., CNKI, WanFang Data and CQVIP) were searched on February 15, 2022. The number of the articles was counted for analysis. CiteSpace was used to conduct a visualization analysis of authors, research institutions and keywords extracted from the identified articles.

A total of 598 articles were finally included. The annual number of publications demonstrated an increasing trend generally during the period, with a peak in 2018 (n=81) . Five major groups of authors were identified. The top three prolific institutions were Gannan Medical University〔113 articles (18.9%) 〕, Guangxi Medical University〔40 articles (6.7%) 〕 and Xinxiang Medical University〔28 articles (4.7%) 〕. The top three high-frequency keywords were "order-oriented" (70 times) , "targeted admission students" (57 times) and "talent cultivation" (44 times) . Eight topic clusters were derived from keyword cluster mapping, namely "#0 learning motivation" "#1 teaching model" "#2 order-oriented cultivation" "#3 influencing factors" "#4 general medicine" "#5 primary care" "#6 medical college" and "#7 medical students". Knowledge map of keywords with the strongest citation bursts showed that the top three were "career identity" "major identity" and "rural primary care". The time-dependent graph indicated that the evolution of research on the training of TAMS could be roughly divided into three stages: education and training for TAMS at school, post-graduation training and education of TAMS, and current work status of TAMS in primary care.

The research on the training of TAMS in China is increasingly flourishing. Relevant policies are the major facilitators for the training of TAMS. The research is also featured by lack of inter-regional and inter-institutional coordination among related research institutions and authors. Moreover, the hotspots are constantly changing with the times, and the major topics about which can be summarized as follows: training models for TAMS, learning motivation of TAMS, and intention to work at primary care and associated factors in TAMS. The future research directions may be the evaluation of current work status and intention to work at primary care in a long-term period in TAMS, effectiveness of the implementation of policies related to the training of TAMS, and the innovative development of training models for TAMS.