Objective: As the development of Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), more and more researchers engage in the study of TCM. Meanwhile, some aspects of TCM are paid more attention by TCM researchers, which are regarded as specific hotspot research directions on the field of TCM. These hotspot research directions can help the researchers understand the dynamic change of TCM researches and guide their future research plan. Therefore, it is meaningful to mine hotspots of TCM from the existing database. Methods: Based on the E-utilities interface of PubMed, the source data can be obtained. They are 10291 abstracts on TCM including manually annotated MeSH terms. Moreover, two hotspot detection schemes are developed according to the characteristics of the source data, one is based on Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms co-occurrence while the other is based on text network. Results: From the experiments results on different hotspot detection schemes, similar key words are obtained to describe major research directions of TCM. Then, according to domain knowledge and practical experience of TCM experts, four consistent hotspots are derived with two different hotspot detection schemes. As shown in the followings: (1) Research on Chinese medical formula and its mechanism of action, (2) Research on pharmacology and pharmacodynamics of antineoplastic agent in TCM, (3) Research on the therapy of chronic diseases in TCM, and (4) Research on traditional therapy methods in TCM. Conclusion: We study the hotspots detection and dynamic change for TCM research directions on PubMed. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Although the proposed schemes are applied to TCM in our research, they also can be extended to other academic fields.