Abstract: Targeted poverty alleviation is an important strategic deployment of the Party and state. Since the targeted task was conducted in 2013, China's poverty alleviation project has achieved remarkable results and generated a batch of academic research achievements. By using Citespace, we have analyzed the publishing time, author, key words and other aspects of poverty alleviation-related research papers between 2013–2016 in CNKI database. And by analyzing related mapping knowledge domain, we tease out hotspot, change rule and development trend of researches on targeted poverty alleviation in recent years. The study found that there is a growth of poverty alleviation-related literatures between 2013–2016, and a shift of research focus. The focus has shifted from the initial research on theory and policy of poverty alleviation towards possible approaches to implementing targeted poverty alleviation, inspecting its effectiveness, to helping poverty-alleviated farmers to achieve sustainable development and to building sound and steady long-term mechanism of poverty alleviation.

Key words: targeted poverty alleviation, mapping knowledge domain, research hotspot, development trend, cluster analysis