Abstract: Objective: To visually analyze the literature on computed tomography virtual monoenergetic imaging (VMI) clinical research and discuss the hotspots and trends in this field. Methods: We searched VMI clinical research-related literature, published in China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) between 1 January 2020 and 28 February 2025, then visually analyzed the number of publications, authors, institutions, journals, and the keywords using CNKI as well as CiteSpace and VOSviewer software tools. Results: We included a total of 441 articles in this study. The number of publications was stable in recent five years at a level of more than 80 articles per year. The authors and institutions of the articles were mainly concentrated in affiliated medical college and university hospitals. The cooperation between authors and institutions remained limited. After search word exclusion, the co-occurrence maps of keywords revealed that the three most frequent keywords were "image quality" (52 articles), "radiation dosage" (17 articles), and "metal artifact" (14 articles), while the three most central keywords were "image quality" (0.23), "lung adenocarcinoma" (0.08), and "radiomics" (0.08). Keyword clustering and burst word mapping suggested that recent research in this field has gradually shifted from technical validation, (e.g., VMI-mediated image quality improvement) to clinical applications (e.g., specific disease diagnosis). Conclusion: In recent five years, VMI clinical research in China displays stable outputs and has been published in high-quality journals. However, collaboration among authors and institutions remains weak and needs to be strengthened. The research hotspots are gradually shifting from technical validation to clinical VMI applications.