Palm oil, derived from the oil palm tree, has become the leading plant-based oil globally, constituting about 35% of plant oil production due to its high yield and versatile applications in food, personal care products, and biofuels. This paper explores the historical factors contributing to palm oil's dominance, its production's environmental and social challenges, and the trends in global research on palm oil. Using bibliometric analysis of the Scopus Data Base from 1992 to 2022, 12,710 peer-reviewed articles were identified with the terms palm and oil in the titles. Of those, 4,787 of the articles were published in open-access journals and 471 were review articles. The top countries that sponsored oil palm research during these 10 years were Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The first three in this list are also the top three producers of palm oil. Biology-, engineering-, and chemistry-related journals published approximately 55 % of the articles focused on oil palm research. In addition, the bibliometric data were used to create a keyword co-occurrence network map of articles with palm and oil in the title using the VOSviewer program. Clusters identified research areas including plant genetics, human health, sustainability, palm oil mill effluent management, and oil palm biomass and its applications. This paper highlights the need for future research to address palm oil cultivation's environmental and social impacts.