Mangrove forests are incredibly important ecosystems. They are biodiversity hotspots, provide livelihood for the coastal communities, maintain the water quality, stabilize shorelines by slowing erosion and capture massive amounts of carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Mangroves thus offer a wide area of research to the scientific community of the world and hence it may be interesting to know the growth of literature in the field of mangrove research. In this context, we present a scientiometric analysis of literature for 7603 Scopus articles published globally in the area of mangrove research during the period 2000–2019. No such study has been done on mangroves after 2012 and hence this study has got its own relevance in scientometrics to highlight the recent developments in the field of mangrove ecosystem and associated research. To accomplish the research Microsoft Excel and Bibexcel were used for the bibliometric analyses and Pajek and CiteSpace were used for mapping and visualization. The results indicate that 90% of work were peer-reviewed articles and a doubling time obtained is 8 years. China leads the rest of the countries by a big margin in the number of publications on mangroves followed by India, and the USA. ‘Remote sensing’, ‘Avicennia marina’, ‘salinity’, ‘sediment’ and ‘climate change’ are the major areas under which the research is progressing in a fast pace. This research study will help the researchers about the direction of evolution of research and upcoming research trends.