Background A growing number of relevant studies on the comorbidity of pain and disability have been published in high-quality journals; however, few studies have analysed quantitatively the characteristics of the topic via bibliometrics. Purpose The study aims to systematically analyze various aspects of global scientific research on pain and disability comorbidity from 1980 to 2019 and determine the global research trend and knowledge structure. Methods A collection of publications on pain and disability comorbidity between 1980 and 2019 was retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection. CiteSpace, Microsoft Excel 2016, and IBM SPSS Statistics 25 software were used to analyze publication outputs, authors, journals, institutions, countries, subject category, types of pain, references, and keywords. Results We collected a total of 3,570 articles in March 9, 2019. Results indicated that the publication outputs had a significant growth in the recent 40 years via the linear regression model (P<0.001). The journal Pain had the maximum output (178), the most cited frequencies in WoS (15,418), the highest impact factor index in 2017 (5.559), and the highest H-index (68). Linear regression analysis revealed that the tendency of multiple authors’ papers increased significantly (t=8.065, P<0.001). In accordance with the top 20 subject categories, Clinical Neurology was the most productive academic area (1095). With regard to types of pain, low back pain and headache were the most widely concerned with a total of 1,114 publications.Conclusion The study outlines the evolution and development of comorbid pain and disability research, reflects the overall situation and lays the groundwork for future research.