Minimally invasive surgery includes traditional laparoscopic and robot-assisted surgery. Although many studies related to robotic surgery and laparoscopic surgery have been published, when doing our search, scientometric studies that focus on related robotic surgery versus laparoscopic surgery were limited. In this study, we aimed to analyze and review the research hots and research status of robotic surgery versus laparoscopic surgery. We searched publications that involved robotic surgery versus laparoscopic surgery in the Web of Science database from 1980 to May 23, 2020. The top 100 publications were published in 2012 with the number of 17 and citations ranged from 618 to 64. Published across 34 different journals, namely European urology (n = 17) and others, the greatest contribution among 36 institutes was made by the Cleveland Clinic (n = 11). Of the top 100 publications, a total of 429 unique words were identified and the most frequently occurring keyword was laparoscopy (n = 33). The co-occurrence of keywords in the top 100 publications indicated that the study of diseases mainly focused on prostatectomy, complications, prostate cancer, retropubic prostatectomy, nephron-sparing surgery, lymph-node dissection, total mesenteric excision, sexual function, rectal cancer, and assisted distal gastrectomy. In recent years, comparative research on robot and laparoscopic surgery has decreased and most studies focus on cancer.