To investigate the research status and trends of application of objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) in medical education in China and globally, and to provide a reference for clinical teaching and medical education research. CNKI and Web of Science Core Collection were searched to identify journal articles related to OSCE published up to the present day. CtieSpace V software was used to visually analyze the research institutions, authors, highly cited literature, and keyword changes of the articles based on scientific knowledge maps. The overall number of publications on OSCE published in China and globally showed an increasing trend, but foreign publications were significantly more than Chinese publications. The institutions and authors were widely distributed. Comprehensive universities were the main institutions in foreign publications, with relatively little cooperation between each other. Domestic research primarily focused on medical education in the early stage, SP training and standardization in the middle stage, and clinical competence for resident physicians, nurses, and other clinical professionals in the late stage. Early foreign research focused mainly on medical education and clinical competence, while later research focused primarily on communication with patients and ability assessment. It is expected that future domestic research will focus on building clinical competence evaluation systems based on the OSCE model, while future foreign research will focus on patient communication and humanistic care assessment.