Abstract: As a management method to promote conservation through management, tourism franchising in protected areas is an important way to effectively alleviate the contradictory relationship between human and natural resources in the management of protected areas and promote the construction of China′s ecological civilization system.In China, the research on tourism franchising in protected areas is still in its infancy, so it is urgent and necessary to sum up international research experience and carry out in-depth research in combination with China′s national conditions. This study uses CiteSpace software, a scientific measurement tool, to sort out global relevant literatures in the past 40 years, analyzes the research process and main contents of tourism franchising in nature protected areas, and then puts forward the issues that should be paid attention to in future research. The findings are as follows: (1) The research has gone through three stages: germination, development and deepening, from early concept and case practice, to institutional design and institutional arrangement. (2) The literatures mainly focuses on concept discrimination, experience mutual learning, management mechanism, community participation and so on. With the continuous expansion of the scope of protected natural areas and the increasing management work, the research focus is more focused on the management mechanism, but there are still many policy appeals and few specific system designs. (3) Based on the analysis of international research progress, it is urgent for Chinese scholars to make joint efforts to further improve the theoretical system of tourism franchising in China′s protected nature areas, expand diversified research methods, propose franchise effectiveness evaluation schemes, explore community participation models and implementation paths, and build a tourism franchising system in protected nature areas in line with China′s national conditions.