Abstract: In order to explore research situation of marine ranching in China, literature resources collected by CNKI was taken as research object, and CiteSpace software was used to analyze characteristics of publication trend, main research institutions, research fields, research levels and leading scholars of domestic marine ranching research．Keyword co-occurrence analysis, keyword clustering analysis, keyword time line analysis, research frontier analysis and other aspects were used to present hot spots and cutting-edge developments of marine ranching research in China．Results indicated that recent 10 years have been a period of vigorous development of marine ranching, and research literature showed a trend of annual increasing．Main research institutions of marine ranching were located in coastal areas．Research of it mainly involved three major fields: aquaculture and fisheries, agricultural economy and oceanography．Research level of marine ranching mainly focused on development research-industry research, technology research and applied basic research．Main clustering words included marine ranching, Shandong Province, leisure fisheries, ministry of agriculture, fishery law enforcement, community structure, Yantai City, Zhangzi Island, etc．Main topics of marine ranching research included marine ranching, artificial fish reefs, proliferation and release, and leisure fisheries．At present, research topics of marine ranching tend to be stable, and research frontiers in recent years were mainly focus on marine fisheries, aquaculture models．Research hotspots mainly focused on intelligence and modernization of marine ranching, artificial fish reefs, fishery resources, value-added release, and leisure fisheries．