The study was explored the direction and trends of microalgae research in the past 10 years in China and abroad. CiteSpace was a software used to visualize and analyze the literature on microalgae published in the core database of CNKI from 2010 to 2023. The results showed that the analysis showed the overall trend of Chinese literature publication on microalgae as the research topic had been stable in the past 10 years, while the publication of English literature had fluctuated significantly. Keywords co-occurrence and emergence analysis showed that main research keywords of microalgae were Chlorella, oil, fatty acid, biodiesel, marine algae, Phaeodactylum tricornutum, Chlorella pyrenoidosa, etc. Keywords cluster analysis showed that the larger clusters are Skeletonema costatum, Taihu lake, livestock and poultry breeding wastewater, Chlorella, fatty acid, wastewater treatment, Haematococcus pluvialis, Dunaliella salina and biomass production. The study indicates that the research direction of microalgae in recent 10 years mainly focuses on bioenergy, aquatic feed, water pollution treatment and the cultivation and development of economically valuable algae species. The exploitation and utilization of algae seed as feed resource has a good application prospect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]