Agarwood is a renowned fragrant non-timber wood product primarily originating from the Indo-Malesia region. It also plays a pivotal role in the global industry due to its economic and cultural significance. As a response to illegal harvesting and trade activities leading to declining populations, all agarwood-producing species have progressively been incorporated into CITES Appendix II. We conducted an in-depth investigation into the temporal dynamics of the scientific literature pertaining to agarwood in this study. The evolving trends in agarwood research and the influence of CITES listing on publication numbers were elucidated by utilizing a bibliometric approach. The quantity of research activity was leveraged as an indicator of the engagement of a country, and the status of agarwood research before and after the CITES listing was analyzed. A rigorous selection process yielded 704 articles from the Web of Science (WoS) core database and 1,054 articles from Scopus, using four specific keywords: "agarwood," "Aquilaria," "Gyrinops," and "gaharu," spanning the years 1995–2022. A notable upswing in the number of scientific publications following the implementation of the CITES listing was identified, while China has been the leading country in most publications and research work since 2009 and 2008 based on WoS and Scopus, respectively. The journal "Molecules" has received the most related articles over the years, and the most popular keyword used is "agarwood." China is also, so far, the country with the most related patents filed. The trending research topics based on the keywords from 2021 to 2022 would be studies related to pharmacological effects, understanding the mechanism of agarwood formation, exploring alternative agarwood-producing species from Gyrinops, and promoting sustainability in agarwood production. Furthermore, the discussion also covered potential research initiatives that could address the existing knowledge gaps in agarwood research up to the present moment.