Abstract: In recent years, domestic attention to the protection of historical and cultural heritage has been increasing. Based on statistics of the four urban planning core journals "City Planning Review" "Planners" "Urban Planning Forum" and "Urban Development Studies" included in CNKI from 2009 to 2019, taking "the history, culture, heritage and protection" as the keyword search, this paper conducts literature analysis of " historical and cultural heritage protection" as research direction appearing in the journal based on CiteSpace software. The results show that in the past ten years, the literature on the protection of historical and cultural heritage has been increasing, and the research content has become more and more diversified, which is greatly influenced by the national policy. The affiliated institutions of the authors of the literature are obviously concentrated in universities and in southeast coast regions. The researches focuse mainly on three aspects of "historical and cultural cities and towns and historical blocks" "traditional villages (ancient villages) protection" "industrial heritage" . And due to the guidance of national policy, the study of traditional villages shows an upward trend. The emphasis of future research should be on multidisciplinary integration, heritage of historical context and selection of protection mode.