Digital twins are one of the promising digital technologies used to facilitate digital transformation. Therefore, it needs to continually be developed remain relevant in industry and academia. Consolidation of research is required to create a common understanding of the topic and to ensure that future research is built upon a solid foundation. Based on a bibliometric review and a thematic analysis of 217 publications on digital twins from the past two decades, this paper creates and analyzes a visual knowledge map and proposes areas for further research. To comprehensively analyze the development trends and research trends of digital twins, we performed statistical analysis of the relevant literature on digital twins within the core collection database of Web of Science. Through our research, we have shown that the current situation, trends, and hotspots of digital twin research were analyzed via CiteSpace. This study demonstrates that research on digital twins is rapidly growing in popularity, that the output of the research depends largely on the core group of authors conducting it, and that digital twins warrant cross-domain and cross-disciplinary research pathways.