Objective: Through research on the geriatric nursing related literature in Chinese journals and medical care and elderly care combination related keywords from 1979 to 2017, this study provides the development trend of geriatric nursing research. Methods: Searching articles in Wanfang, CNKI, VIP database, selecting the keywords and published time of the paper. Employing descriptive statistics to describe literatures information such as publication time, quantity of keywords, word frequency of keywords, heat degree of keywords, character of keywords and so on. Results: Totally 134 791 articles were got and 58 031 articles were included in the analysis. The amount of literature growth was slow before 2005, The cumulative amount of literature in 1979-2005 was only 12.75% of the total amount of literature. After 2005, the amount of literature increased rapidly year by year. The number of literature published in 2017 has exceeded 12%. The amount of the geriatric nursing related literature was proportional to the number of people aged 65 and over in China. In the research of geriatric nursing, the content related to medical care and elderly care combination was quite dispersed, and it did not involve research at the level of Medical Association. The medical care and elderly care combination and Medical Association were new areas in the research of geriatric nursing. Conclusion The amount of the geriatric nursing related literature from 1979 to 2017 was proportional to the number of people aged 65 and over in China. There are few researches on how to carry out geriatric nursing under the policy of medical care and elderly care combination and Medical Association, which should be the focus of future research and exploration to actively respond to the challenge of aging population.