Context In recent years, the important value of rural landscape has been highlighted in tourism, cultural heritage, ecology and other elds, rural landscape research (RLR) has been paid more and more attention by researchers, with the deepening of research, RLR has the characteristics of diversity and complexity.Objectives To understand the development trend of RLR in the past 20 years, the distribution of research power, research hotspots and frontal research, to comb through the relevant results of RLR, to analyze the progress of RLR, and nally to integrate the main contents of RLR in a framework.Methods 735 related literatures were selected from the WoS Core Collection Database, and the papers on RLR from 1992 to 2020 were quantitatively data mined and qualitatively summarized by using Bibliometrics and VOSviwer software for mapping and analysis.Results (1) The number of papers on RLR increased from 1992 to 2020, during which it gradually became a hotspot research eld that attracted increasing global attention. (2) From the research strength, Europe has a great in uence in RLR, and has issued a series of conventions and protection policies, making its rural landscape become a model of modern rural development. There is little international cooperation and exchange in RLR, which is not conducive to the development of disciplines. Landscape & Urban Planning journals t the theme of RLR. (3) The ve hotspots of RLR are: rural cultural landscape and rural development; rural tourism landscape, the matching of landscape value and landscape perception; urban-rural interaction, land use change and landscape pattern con ict; change of ecosystem service value; rural landscape planning, protection and management.Conclusions RLR has developed from a study based on geography and ecology to a comprehensive research direction combining multidisciplinary and multimethods of social and economic development, culture and other elements. At present, RLR covers the ecological landscape, production landscape, tourism landscape and cultural landscape of rural landscape system, changes from static pattern of rural landscape to dynamic evolution process, urban-rural interaction, ecosystem service and multifunctional landscape trade-off, and changes from single dimension to multi-dimensional in research paradigm, and combines "3S" technology and various landscape ecological model software. From the perspective of multidisciplinary research, from the perspective of rural landscape system, the correlation and mechanism between rural landscape multifunctionality, and dynamic monitoring and trend simulation, help to clarify the rural landscape multi-functional trade-off ideas and paths to guide the sustainable development of rural areas.Landscape Ecology 23 3.17% 3.385