Objective The aims of this study were to understand the status quo of authors, collaborations between institutions, research hotspots, and research frontiers of fund-sponsored clinical nursing papers and to provide a reference for Chinese scholars to conduct clinical nursing studies in the future. Methods The visualization software CiteSpace was used to analyze fund-sponsored clinical nursing papers published between 2012 and 2016 in 12 core journals of nursing. Results In the clinical nursing field, there are many cooperative author groups; however, the collaborations between institutions are not close and exist mainly within the same province or city. High-frequency keywords have revealed the four clinical nursing research hotspots of population, diseases, nursing intervention, and others. Chinese medicine nursing, prevention, treatment and nursing, and new technology-aided nursing of ventilator-associated pneumonia are the study frontiers of clinical nursing. Conclusions Clinical nursing studies are rich in content and cover a wide range of areas, and their hotspots and frontiers are closely related to the requirements of clinical nursing. Collaborations across regions, provinces, and cities are not adequate; there is an urgent need to strengthen the cross-regional exchanges and collaborations to promote the further development of clinical nursing.