Industry, university and research institute are important parts of the national education system.In order to fully understand the research status, hot spots and frontier trends of higher vocational industry-university-research, the core journal literature collected by CNKI from 2002 to 2022 is taken as the data source, and the CiteSpace visualization network tool is used to carry out knowledge graph analysis from the aspects of publication, hot spots and frontier trends of industry-university-research. The results show that the number of articles published in higher vocational industry-university-research increases firstly and then decreases, and high-yielding industry-university-research institutions and experts form four large cooperation teams. The integration of industry and education, combination of work and study, school-enterprise cooperation, collaborative education, innovation and entrepreneurship, and industrial college are the current research hotspots. The research frontier mainly includes operation mechanism, connotation construction, innovation and entrepreneurship, and industrial college. The research results can provide reference for higher vocational colleges to deepen the collaborative innovation education of production, university and research.