This paper searches the keywords of 11 055 tourism articles in 16 authoritative academic journals from 2001 to 2018 with bibliometrics and content analysis. The visualization software CiteSpace is applied to do keywords statistics and present the knowledge map of tourism research in order to conclude the evolution of Chinese tourism research from three spells of 2001 to 2006, 2007 to 2012, and 2013 to 2018 respectively. The results show that the hotspots in tourism research are continuous and evolutionary, with better research effects coming from overall continuity and the later stage of the evolution when the earlier research stage focuses on tourist application and economic benefits while the later stages focuse on theoretical methods and tourists.