Background: Virtual simulation has been widely used in nursing education and nursing training. This study aims to characterize the publications in terms of countries, institutions, journals, authors, collaboration relationships, and analyze the trends of virtual simulation in nursing research.Methods: Publications regarding virtual simulation in nursing were retrieved from Web of Science core collection. Microsoft Excel 2010, VOSviewer were used to characterize the contributions of the authors, journals, institutions, and countries. The trends, hot-spots and knowledge network were analyzed by Citespace and VOSviewer.Results: We identified 611 papers between 1999 and 2021. The number of publications grew slowly until 2019, after that, it got a sharp increase in 2020 and 2021. The USA, Canada and Australia were three key contributors to this field. Centennial College, University of Ottawa, and Ryerson University were three major institutions with a larger number of publications. Verkuyl M was the most productive and highest cited author. Clinical Simulation in Nursing, Nurse Education Today, Journal of Nursing Education were the three productive journals. "virtual patients," "nursing students," "clinical simulation," and "communication skills" were the frontier topics in recent years.Conclusion: Using the Virtual patients to train nursing students, developing more reliable and objective assessment methods to validate learning outcomes might be the recent and future hot-topics.