Abstract: In the mining industry, from the concept of green mining to the formation of industry consensus, from typical pilot practice to rising national strategic actions, from experimental demonstration to comprehensive promotion, green mining has experienced leap-forward development and has become a green, low-carbon, circular economy.Meanwhile, green minging development has also received high attention from government departments, academia and industry.The large historical data of literatures can reflect the evolution and development of the research direction of a certain subject, and we use a bibliometric analysis tool to collect and analyse the green mining (green mine green mining, green exploration, ecological mines) literatures between 1979 and 2018 derived from journal database, dissertation database and conference paper database in CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure).The results show that the extensive research of green mining began in 2008.The research characteristics of colleges and universities, public institutions, social organizations, administrative agencies and enterprises are different.The main research topics are green mining, sustainable development, green mine, circular economy and other aspects.Empirical and comparative analyses are the main methods in this field.The establishment of indicators and evaluation criteria for green mines is a research focus and key issue.