Abstract: China needs sustainable green development and green credit is an important market means for energy conservation, emission reduction, environmental protection and industrial structure optimization. How is the current research status and development prospect of the Chinese green credits? In order to understand the current development of green credit research in China, we selected the relevant literature from 2007 to 2020 as research object that has been published by the CSSCI source journals and the Chinese core journals in the database of China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). As a side note, non－academic literature among them, such as news reports, book reviews and so on.Finally, we got 263 domestic documents in the database of CNKI.As quantitative research can reflect the research hotspots and research status in a certain field more objectively, the CiteSpace software was used in this paper to draw knowledge maps， which was more simple and effective. The visual and quantitative analysis on those full literature samples were conducted in this way.Then the maps were utilized to analyze the literature，and the current research topics were to be grasped and the research trends were also to be judged，which may provide a useful reference for the in-depth study of green credit.
   The main research conclusions in this paper are as follows: (1) The research objects of green credit have been shifted from macroscopic research to microscopic research. The early research focused on the concept and necessity of developing green credit in China and the factors affecting the implementation of green credit. After the green credit policy was issued and implemented, academia began to analyze the effects of green credit implementation from a micro level such as commercial bank performance, investment and financing of heavy pollution firms. (2) The research methods of green credit have been evolved from a predominantly qualitative to a predominantly quantitative study, but the availability of data limits the progress of micro-empirical research. However, the samples are often too small with limited data in the research on green credit and commercial bank performance, which significantly reduces the accuracy of empirical research. As for the empirical research on green credit and heavy-polluting companies, most studies can only use dummy variables to represent green credit policies, and there are short of data to support further empirical research. (3) The relationship between research and practice of green credit is in need of further work. There are few evaluative studies on the effect of green credit implementation, which makes it hard to judge the effectiveness of green credit policies.〖JP〗
Our work not only brings about systemic references for new researchers，but also suggests the further research directions. We need to advance the academic research, better the government policies and promote the business practices of green credits. It is therefore in need to improve the green credit policy system and statistical system in order to provide enough data support for green credit research and supervision, to strengthen and deepen the evaluation research on the effect of green credit policy implementation and to expand research on green credit incentive and restraint policies is also important.

Key words: green credit, knowledge map, visualized analysis