Abstract: With the development and enrichment of mountain tourism research, it is of great significance to comprehensively sort out, rationally reflect and examine the literature in this field. With the help of CiteSpace visualization software, the knowledge map of mountain tourism research was constructed, which objectively presented the evolution, development and trend of the research. It was found that: (1) In the past 30 years, the research on mountain tourism had achieved great enrichment, and it had experienced three research stages as a whole. At present, it maintained a high fluctuation growth period of the number of published documents; (2) The hot topics in the research field included mountain resource analysis and tourism development, mountain tourism impact and sustainable development research; (3) Among the research topics, mountain resource analysis and tourism development research complemented each other. The research on the impact of mountain tourism had an obvious shift from "things" to "people". The research on the sustainable development of mountain tourism gradually deepened with the highland and mankind relationship system as the core.