BACKGROUND: Spinal cord stimulation (SCS), a common invasive neuromodulation technique, induces pain relief via electrical stimulation of the dorsal column of the spinal cord. To present an overview of research publications on SCS, a bibliometric analysis of scientific publications from 1998 to 2017 was performed. METHODS: The relevant data were obtained from the Web of Science and PubMed database. These articles were classified into several categories, such as total number, countries, institutions, authors, and citations reports. The analysis of co-occurrence key words was handled by VOSviewer software. RESULTS: We found that there existed an increasing trend in the number of publications on SCS between 1998 and 2017. Among these countries, the United States published the largest number of papers in the past 20 years. Case Western Reserve University in the United States contributed the most publications. Among all research categories, neuroscience neurology was the most common area. In addition, regarding article types, basic research comprised a great proportion of the total papers on SCS in the PubMed database. The author V. Reggie Edgerton from the United States was the most-frequent contributor among the authors. The results showed that "spinal cord," "stimulation," and "pain" were the most common key words in the past 20 years. CONCLUSIONS: This bibliometric analysis first provides a basic overview of research publications on SCS published during the last 2 decades. Considering the expanded indications of SCS, there are a lot of things to do, and various countries should increase support to complete high-quality SCS studies.