In recent decades the research of heavy vehicles has taken great importance for the development of multiple industries at a commercial level. From the scientific point of view, this led to the need for various studies on this field. This paper analyses the field of heavy vehicles from 1912 to the first quarter of 2017 identifying the patterns from the publications, including the most important authors and institutions; high-frequency categories and keywords; journal and author contributions; most important research topics and evolution of the field based on cluster analysis. A scientometric approach based on bibliometric analysis is employed. Records from WOS and Scopus have been gathered using two bibliometric tools CiteSpace and SciMAT.