This research reports the publication trend of analytical thinking skills (ATS) in physical education (PE) from the Scopus database for 1983-2023 (the last 40 years). On October 4, 2023, the data was inspected using the title, abstract, and keyword "Analytical AND Thinking AND Skills AND Physical AND Education," which succeeded in finding 30 published documents, and 1 article was eliminated because it was duplicated. The 29 bibliographies represent four types of documents, namely articles (55%), conference papers (35%), book chapters (7%), and reviews (3%). In the last 40 years, only in 2023 were up to 6 documents successfully published, whereas in other years 1 article. The results of the VOSviewer analysis prove that network, overlay, and density do not have a high item load, so they do not give rise to large-term patterns in the visualization. Finally, research on ATS in PE is, in fact, still very limited, thus providing potential opportunities for future researchers to develop ATS research themes in various aspects to support the implementation of quality PE to support students surviving in the 21st century.