Abstract: Volunteered geographic information is a new type of geographical information which distinguished by the traditional geographic information collection mode, which makes the ordinary citizen participate in the geography research and enriched the geographical data source, promoting new scientific cognition and research development of geography. In recent years, Volunteered geographic information related research has shown a rapid increasing trend. In order to grasp the overall situation of VGI research, research hotspots and research trend ,a database was created and consisted by the paper of volunteered geographic information from “Web of Science” database from 2007 to 2017,based on the CiteSpace software, visualization analysis the development status and main research hotspots of volunteered geographic information. Combined with literature reading, the theoretical and technical problems are analyzed and summarized. Since 2007, volunteered geographic information developing rapidly, its application is very extensive, involving a number of areas of disaster emergency monitoring, city management, environmental monitoring, tourism, agriculture, medical industry and so on. The hotspots of the study of volunteered geographic information in the world mainly focus on the citizen science, network and information technology, data and the application of volunteered geographic information, according to the development situation of volunteered geographic information in our country, China’s volunteered geographic information development and improvement in the future should be follow the four principles: standardization, mobile terminal, automation, expansion. In the process of the construction of the next generation of digital earth, volunteered geographic information can be used for developing the global production of geographic data. At the same time, the investigation and analysis of micro individual behavior and the analysis of Big Geo-Data based on volunteered geographic information are important research directions in the future.