The study of maritime traffic situation is the key to safe navigation and efficient management of ships.According to the progress,trend and existing problems of maritime traffic situation research,776 relevant literature from 2000 to 2023 were mined and ana-lyzed by CiteSpace software.The results show that the number of published documents re-lated to maritime traffic situation shows an overall increasing trend,and the research hot-spots in relevant fields mainly focus on ship traffic flow prediction and maritime traffic situation assessment.The research frontiers include AIS data mining and ship collision avoidance and other maritime traffic situation safety issues.However,the key problems such as the pattern recognition of ship navigation behavior and the evolution mechanism of temporal and spatial characteristics of maritime traffic situation need to be further studied.