Abstract: Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, China’s literature indexing has gone
through the process from classified indexing, subject indexing to diversified indexing. The indexing methods
have become more and more abundant, and the indexing technology has made continuous progress. It
has gradually changed from manual indexing, machine aided indexing to automatic indexing, and further
to the direction of intelligent indexing. Although the domestic research on literature indexing and related
technologies is relatively rich, the literature indexing research is relatively weak, which cannot effectively
present the development trend and application prospect of literature indexing field driven by modern
information technology. Based on the existing research, this paper analyzes the trend of literature indexing
research in China, and points out that the literature indexing research in China mainly presents two stages
of development: one is the development stage with traditional indexing as the main body before the 21st
century, whereas the other is the development stage with automatic indexing as the main body after the 21st
century. The research on traditional indexing, such as manual and machine-aided, has laid a good foundation
for the development of automatic indexing. As a result, automatic indexing has made remarkable progress in
indexing technology, indexing system and indexing method, while the application field of literature indexing
has been further expanded. However, literature indexing research is more in the field of artificial intelligence
and linguistics. It is bound to require the library science to give full play to its own theoretical and practical

advantages in the field of literature indexing. It will also further require to utilize research results of other

disciplines so as to make the traditional literature indexing technology of library science conform to the
development of the times, produce spillover effect, and develop together with other disciplines.