The maximum cadmium tolerance standards were established by the European Union in 2014, for the importation of cocoa-based products, causing concern in the countries. Global studies on Theobroma cacao research related to cadmium activity in the atmosphere were analyzed. Bibliometric analyses in R and VOSviewer programs were used to examine 64 documents published in the Scopus database according to keywords. We identified 811 keywords in the co-occurrence of terms, 5 thematic groups in the bibliographic coupling, 20 institutions as most important affiliations, 20 countries of origin of corresponding authors, 112 institutions in co-authorship network of which 5 are in primary documents, and two groups in thematic similarity in co-citation of documents. The United States leads the scientific production with 11 papers, followed by Colombia (8) and Ecuador (7). In 1996, the first sc...