Bipolar disorder (BD) is a chronic psychiatric disorder that combines hypomania or mania and depression. The study aims to investigate the research areas associated with cognitive function in bipolar disorder and identify current research hotspots and frontier areas in this field.Publications related to cognitive function in BD from 2012 to 2022 were searched on the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database. VOSviewer, CiteSpace, and Scimago Graphica were used to conduct this bibliometric analysis.A total of 989 articles on cognitive function in BD were included in this review. These articles were mainly from the United States, China, Canada, Spain and the United Kingdom. Our results showed that the journal "Journal of Affective Disorders" published the most articles. Apart from "Biploar disorder" and "cognitive function", the terms "Schizophrenia", "Meta analysis", "Rating scale" were also the most frequently used keywords. The research on cognitive function in bipolar disorder primarily focused on the following aspects: subgroup, individual, validation and pathophysiology.The current concerns and hotspots in the filed are: "neurocognitive impairment", "subgroup", "1st degree relative", "mania", "individual" and "validation". Future research is likely to focus on the following four themes: "Studies of the bipolar disorder and cognitive subgroups", "intra-individual variability", "Validation of cognitive function tool" and "Combined with pathology or other fields".© 2024. The Author(s).