Abstract: As an important type of social ecosystem, mountain plays an important role in the ecological conservation of land space, regional coordinated development, national sustainable development and the construction of national overall security system. This paper took 384 types of datasets on the theme of ' mountain social ecosystem ' funded by the National Social Science Fund from 1991 to 2021 as samples, and used Python,Arcgis and CiteSpace to analyze the basic situation, research group characteristics and hot topics of mountain social ecosystem research projects. The results showed that : （1） In terms of the basic situation of the project : the number of annual project of mountain research showed a fluctuating growth trend, which could be divided into three stages : initial development, jump rise and spiral growth. The number of projects on western area had obvious advantages, which was 2.72 times of the average level. The distribution of disciplines had the dual characteristics of diversification and focusing, involving 96 % of the subjects, but was significantly concentrated in ethnology, accounting for 34%.（2） In terms of the characteristics of the research groups, the spatial distribution of the study population showed a trend of shifting from the southwest cold spot gathering area to the central hot spot gathering area.（3）As far as the research area and content were concerned : the hotspots in the mountain project research area were concentrated and the distribution was severely unbalanced. The hotspots were significantly concentrated in Wuling Mountain and more than 80% of the main mountains were not included; The research content mainly focused on mountain ethnic culture, mountain poverty alleviation mechanism, mountain coordinated development and mountain ecological security, with significant cohesion. Based on the comprehensive analysis of the research hotspots, policies and literature of mountains, this paper concluded that the construction of mountain discipline system, the re-understanding of mountain functions and the cross-domain joint governance of mountains were worthy of academic attention and further research.