Since the 21st century, the global demand for natural resources is increasing, especially non-renewable resources.As a very significant non-renewable strategic resource, rare earth elements have an increasing influence on metallurgy, petrochemical industry and new material preparation.The special arrangement of valence electrons gives it an insurmountable advantage over ordinary elements, which makes its application almost spread across all industries of the national economy.Since the 1990s, the continuous exploitation of rare earth resources and the discovery of new mineral deposits abroad have led to a decreasing proportion of rare earth resources in the world, which has brought severe challenges to rare earth related industries in China, and it is urgent to learn more about the application of rare earth elements.Based on CNKI database, on June 12, 2022, advanced retrieval method is used to search keywords rare earth application and rare earth elements application.After screening and de-weighting, 499 papers related to the application research of rare earth elements from 2010 to the first half of 2022 are obtained.Based on CiteSpace6.1.R1 software, the current application research status and development trend of this field are analyzed from five aspects that the number of published papers in each year, the core authors of published papers, the core institutions of published papers, the outbreak of keywords in each year and keyword clustering.The results show that rare earth elements are popular in hydrogen storage materials, luminescent materials, permanent magnet materials, flocculation materials and other fields.The future research direction and prospect of rare earth element industry are also prospected.