Abstract: Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, along with the continuous promotion of the national strategy of new urbanization and rural revitalization, characteristic towns have become the focus of multi-disciplinary research such as information technology, ecology and geography. CiteSpace was used to sort out CSSCI and Chinese core literature in CNKI database from 2014 to 2024, and to discuss the status quo, hot spots and evolution trend of research on characteristic towns. The results show that the annual number of documents issued by characteristic towns has obvious policy orientation, which goes through three stages: slow start, rapid development and steady adjustment. The research theme of characteristic town has been expanded horizontally, and core research themes such as "sports and leisure characteristic town", "rural revitalization" and "urban-rural integration and development" have appeared. The research methods of characteristic towns have been in-depth across disciplines, and research results such as "meta-universe + rural revitalization", "spatial distribution + type division", "Chinese culture + brand strategy" have appeared. Most of the core authors conducted independent research and lacked academic cooperation; The research focus of the representative issuing institutions is different, and the institutional regions are mostly distributed in the pilot areas of characteristic small towns. Driving the high-quality development of characteristic towns, innovating the development model of characteristic towns and promoting the industrial upgrading of characteristic towns are the important research directions of characteristic towns in the future.