Friction stir welding (FSW) and friction stir spot welding (FSSW) are relatively newer method in weld joint to compete other techniques especially in joining aluminum alloys. Early days, FSW was meant to be joining aluminum alloys, but nowadays researcher trials to joining magnesium, copper, stainless steel, and even polymers. When the other technology constantly has problematic result in joining aluminum alloys in late 80’s, example of this, a fusion weld such as metal inert gas (MIG) and tungsten inert gas (TIG). In 1991, The Welding Institute (TWI) found a new method that was promising to join aluminum alloys which was FSW and later in early 2000’s a new method called FSSW was introduced to compete against resistance spot welding (RSW). This article mainly focuses on introducing statistically and infographic way of a review, in such that readers can easily mapping what major topics, materials, parameters, and tools used by the researchers and what is the possibly minor to covered or might be has not been covered by anyone. Ideally, more than 500 articles across different journals needs to be covered from early days until now using statistics sampling method. For early step, this article only covered 109 major articles FSW and FSSW. Therefore, the stats cannot be concluded for the whole research in FSW and FSSW, that is because the comprehensive beyond the ideal. © 2025 Institute of Physics Publishing. All rights reserved.