Abstract: A network analysis of literatures in the lake sediments research field is not only important for understanding the current research status, research hotspot and future development trend of this field, but also significant for providing us scientific references to investigate and protect ecological environments of the lakes at Yangtze River’s downstream. This paper evaluated the research status and development trend of lake sediments. An effective bibliometric analysis was conducted to analyze the existing literature about “lake sediment” which were published in the the database Web of ScienceTM Core Collection (WOS) 1931 to 2016. And word frequency statistics, cluster analysis and network analysis methods were applied. The results showed that 9 126 related documents were retrieved in this field, and the number of published documents had an exponential growth with time (R2=0.98, P<0.01). The United States had the largest number of articles published, a total of 2 086, accounting for 20.5% of the total number of published articles. There were 2 086 articles published in China, second only to the United States. Developed countries such as Europe and the United States had contributed a great deal to the volume of research literature. Meanwhile, in developing countries, China played an important role in the field of lake sediment. The three subjects with the largest number of research literatures were Environmental Sciences & Ecology, Geology and Marine & Freshwater Biology, with 3 368 (22.0%), 2 698 (17.6%), and 2 099 (13.7%) articles respectively. The top three journals published on lake sediment were Journal of Paleolimnology, Hydrobiologia and Limnology and Oceanography. The number of articles published were 412, 366, and 237, which accounted for 4.5%, 4.0%, and 2.6% of the total articles respectively. From the perspective of research hotspots and development trends in this field, the research hot spots in the study of lake sediments focus on the field of the pollution and risk of heavy metals and organic pollutants, study of lake sediments and paleoclimate, as well as lake eutrophication. Their frequency of occurrence as keywords was in the top 10. In the future, ‘lake sediment model’ and ‘multivariate statistical applications’ appear as new keywords, and frequency appears in the top 50. They had a certain research value and development space.