Aiming at 2 775 CSSCI journal documents of China's economic development from 1998 to 2020 in the CNKI database, using scientometrics methods, was sort out the cooperation characteristics and frontier hotspots of China's economic development research, including the statistics of the number of publications, the distribution of institutional cooperation, the characteristics of author cooperation, Research hotspots and evolution analysis. Studies have shown that：①The volume of papers referring to China's economic development research shows a trend of ‘Fluctuation rising-falling-continuously rising’, a number of closely-cooperating universities and research institutions have been formed. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has now become the representative research institution that has made the greatest contribution to China's economic development. However, the cooperation of authors presents the characteristics of "small gathering and large dispersion", and it is urgent to accelerate the formation of a stable core author group. ②Keywords such as "China's economic development", "regional economy", and "economic growth" have important position and influence in the co-occurrence network of China's economic development research. Keywords such as "China's economy", "low-carbon economy", and "China" are at the core. Research topics represented by keywords such as "high-quality development", "high-quality economic development", "regional economic development", "circular economy", "development model", and "real economy" have become emerging research hotspots. ③The evolution of China’s economic development research can be summarized as follows: 1998-2009, focusing on the research topics such as national and regional economic development, circular economy, and knowledge economy; 2009—2016, focusing on the research topics such as economic development methods and economic development mode, low-carbon economy, real economy, and marine economy; 2016—2020, focusing on the research topics such as the quality of economic development, new development concepts, and ecological environment.