Objective The current research status of life quality of Chinese pneumoconiosis patients was analyzed by bibliometric methods to orientate the further research.

Methods The CNKI database was retrieved, and the titles, publication time, abstracts and keywords of the relevant articles were exported into Excel, then statistical analysis was done.

Results Sixty-two selected articles showed that the research about life quality of Chinese pneumoconiosis patients had become the hot issue in recent years. The literature published in the "core journals" accounted for 12.90%, which was pretty low. The present study on life quality of pneumoconiosis patients in our country was done mainly in the discipline area of preventive medicine; 45.16% of author worked in the institutes of prevention and treatment for occupation disease. Though the quality of life scale was used in 61.29% of the literatures, the used scales varied from each other and were not standardized. In 64.52% of the literatures which received field survey, control groups were set only in 38% literatures. The studies showed that the main factors affecting the life quality were demographic factors, disease factors, psychological factors and social support. Rehabilitation treatment and nursing intervention could help to improve the patients' life quality.

Conclusion Though the research on the life quality of pneumoconiosis patients had been the hot issue recently, the quality of papers should be improved. Specifically, the research methods need to be standardized and uniformed, so that the results can be improved. QLICD-GM could be a good scale for study on life quality of Chinese pneumoconiosis patients.