Abstract: The establishment of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) plays an important role in promoting the research and development of traditional villages. In this paper, 1215 papers published in 521 NSFC funded projects in the past 20 years from 2001 to 2020 were taken as the research object, and CiteSpace software was used for literature statistical analysis to summarize discipline code, project type, research topic and research content, etc. The results show that:The research subjects of traditional villages are diversified, mainly architecture (discipline code E0801), urban and rural planning (discipline code E0802) and human geography (discipline code D0102). The research has experienced three stages:germination, slow growth, and rapid growth. In terms of the overall research content, the foothold is centered on the protection, utilization, inheritance and development of traditional villages. The protection of traditional villages is always the core proposition, but the deep integration of quantitative research and qualitative research will be an important breakthrough for the innovation of traditional village research methods.