Objective To make visual analysis on the hot spots and trends of studies on Shanggu Tianzhen Lun（ 上古天真论） in Plain Questions（ 素问） through the knowledge map. Methods The researchers searched the studies of Shanggu Tianzhen Lun from January 2006 to January 2017 in CNKI

and then did the visualization with the nodes as following: authors

institutions and keywords. The frequencies of these words were also calculated. Results A total of 857 data were included. From 2006 to 2017

72 people published study on Shanggu Tianzhen Lun in total. The authors with top 5 frequencies are WU Xiaoke（ 7）

SUN Guangren（ 5）

HOU Lihui（ 5）

ZHANG Xinyu（ 5） and WANG Hongwu（ 4）. The authors with top 5 emerging trends are WU Xiaoke（ 5. 3995）

HOU Lihui（ 3. 7747）

WANG Qi（ 2. 8911）

WANG Hongwu（ 2. 6971） and SUN Guangren（ 2. 6701）. The institutions with top 5 frequencies are Shandong University of Chinese Medicine（ 29）

Beijing University of Chinese Medicine（ 27）

Shanghai University of Chinese Medicine（ 23）

Chengdu University of Chinese Medicine（ 18） and Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine（ 14）. There are a total of 169 nodes 318 connections in the keywords co-occurrence network map

in which the ones with top 5 frequency are Huangdi Neijing（ the Canon of Internal Medicine

《黄帝内经》

347）

Shanggu Tianzhen Lun（ 171）

health preserving（ 121）

Chinese medicine（ 74）

preventive treatment of disease（ 66） and the ones with top 5 centrality are Shanggu Tianzhen Lun（ 0. 64）

Huangdi Neijing（ 0. 58）

health preserving（ 0. 46）

Chinese medicine（ 0. 18） and Shengqi Tongtian Lun（ Qi Production and Its Utmost Ability

《生气通天论》

0. 16）. Keywords co-occurrence clustering results can be divided into nine categories

and the keywords with the highest frequency in each category are respectively following: category 0

Chinese medicine and preventive treatment of disease; category 1

Huangdi Neijing; category 2

Shanggu Tianzhen Lun; category 3

exuberance of kidney Qi and Tiangui（ reproduction-stimulating essence）; category 4 and category 6

health preserving; category 5

category 7 and category 8

Suwen and kidney Qi. Conclusion The researchers and institutions studying Shanggu Tianzhen Lun are scattered during the past 10 years. Research on inheritance of experience has become a new hot spot since 2014

and the research trends tend to go from the original text mining applications to deeper theoretical research.