As massification of higher education developed, employment challenges in changing labour markets aroused the attention of scholars globally. An interdisciplinary approach called world-system theory is applied by scholars from the social sciences, history, anthropology and cultural studies. This study applied the theory in a bibliometric analysis of graduate employment research using R and CiteSpace. It identified the main characteristics (e.g. authors and countries) of relevant research, investigated the social and economic context of certain milestone publications and visualised research hot spots. World-system theory, as a macrosociological approach to describing the world economy and social system, is innovatively applied in illustrating the findings of the current work. Results indicate that core countries not only are economically influential but also dominating the academic research. Scholars in semi-peripheral and peripheral countries are encouraged to establish transnational networks and foster academic collaborations.