Job stress has emerged as one of the most significant occupational health challenges of the twenty first century, influencing employee wellbeing, organizational performance, and societal productivity. Despite the exponential growth of academic publications on job stress across disciplines such as medicine, social sciences, and business management, there remains limited integrative understanding of how this body of knowledge has evolved, how it is structured, and what intellectual patterns dominate the field. The present study undertakes a comprehensive bibliometric and theoretical analysis of job stress research published between 2010 and 2020, drawing on 851 documents retrieved from the Scopus database. Using principles of informetrics and scientometrics, the study identifies publication trends, influential authors, dominant institutions, thematic clusters, and geographical distributions of knowledge production. A network of 62 keywords was extracted and classified into 10 clusters, revealing that effort reward imbalance, gender, and job strain are the most recurrent conceptual anchors of job stress research. Citation analysis further shows that 24 countries met the minimum threshold of eight citations, with the United Kingdom emerging as the most influential country in terms of citation impact. The analysis also indicates that medicine, social sciences, and business management and accounting constitute the most prominent disciplinary homes of job stress research, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the phenomenon. Institutional analysis demonstrates that Islamic Azad University has produced the largest number of publications, while Lambert E G is identified as the most prolific author in the dataset. Beyond mapping the intellectual structure of the field, the study engages deeply with theoretical models of job stress, including effort reward imbalance theory, job strain theory, and coping based frameworks, situating the bibliometric findings within a broader conceptual narrative. By integrating bibliometric evidence with theoretical interpretation, the study provides both a cartography of existing scholarship and a roadmap for future research. The results offer important implications for researchers, policy makers, and practitioners by highlighting underexplored themes, methodological gaps, and geographical imbalances in job stress research. Limitations related to database coverage and the exclusive use of Scopus are acknowledged, and future research directions are proposed, including the use of Web of Science and other databases to validate and extend the present findings. Overall, this research represents one of the first systematic bibliometric investigations of job stress literature and contributes to a more coherent and cumulative understanding of how the field has developed over time.