Financial systemic risk has an impact on the real economy and may trigger a chain reaction in the whole economic system leading to the financial crisis. Many scholars focus on financial systemic risk, but few of them are bibliometric analyses. Therefore, this paper explores the status quo, emerging trends, and transition trajectory through the above analysis method in the research field from 1990 to 2020. Based on the above analysis, we find the following conclusions: (1) The basic conclusions of the most productive countries, institutions, journals, authors, status quo, and the change of hotspots in this research field are presented. (2) The emerging trends in this research field are 'credit risk', 'capital shortfall', 'spill-over', 'spread', 'financial market', 'interconnectedness', 'transmission' in the last three years. (3) The research field of financial systemic risk presents an S-shaped transition trajectory through the local forward, the local backward, the global standard, and the global key-route main path analysis. (4) We find that the most cited authors are not always at the core of the trajectory of financial systemic risk research. The emerging trend 'credit risk' is also recently a core research direction in this research field's transition trajectory.