Objective/Meaning  The Fourth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China proposed to resolutely win the battle against poverty and establish a long-term mechanism to solve the relative poverty. By sorting out the research status quo and hotspots of relative poverty in China, it could provide reference for the future research in the research field of relative poverty.

  Methods/Procedures  By taking the information of 799 research papers related to “relative poverty” included in the core journals of Peking University, CSSCI, and CSCD databases from 2017 to 2021 as the object, the CiteSpace software was used to make a visual analysis from the perspectives of the annual number of papers, publishing journals, publishing authors, publishing institutions and keywords.

  Results/Conclusions  The results showed that the study of relative poverty has gradually become a research hotspot in academia. The study of relative poverty has experienced two stages of stable development and rapid development in the past five years. The study mainly focused on the governance research of multidimensional poverty and relative poverty. Under the new domestic situation, the theoretical expansion and practical path of relative poverty, the integration of urban and rural areas, the effective connection between consolidating and expanding the achievements of poverty alleviation and rural revitalization were the parts that needed to be focused on in the future.