In recent years, the domestic academic circles have extensively discussed the theory and practice of emergency management in public hospitals. Taking 470 literatures on public health emergency management in public hospitals from 2003 to 2023 in CNKI database as research samples, the bibliometric software CiteSpace was used for knowledge graph analysis. The study found that the number of research literatures in this field increased in general, and the outbreak of COVID-19 was taken as the time interval point, forming two stages of low stability and explosive growth with different research hotspots in different periods. After the outbreak of COVID-19, public hospitals, epidemic prevention and control, emergency management and the impact of the epidemic on hospital management have become hot spots. Medical union, epidemic prevention and control, novel coronavirus pneumonia, infectious diseases, and party building leadership are "emergent words" in the past four years. In the future, it is necessary to continuously expand the research horizon, extend the scope of research topics, constantly promote the cross-disciplinary theory system and research paradigm of public health emergency management in public hospitals, promote the diversification of research methods and strengthen mutual research cooperation.