Abstract: On the 50th anniversary of Progress in Earthquake Sciences, the scientific bibliometrics methods supplied by CiteSpace are used to conduct author collaboration network analysis and keyword co-occurrence analysis of the 7151 papers published in Recent Developments in World Seismology from 1979 to 2020. The work aims to systematically explore the thematic context, knowledge evolution, historical hot spots and author group development of the publications of Recent Developments in World Seismology in the different periods. The continuous changes in the theme, advancement of knowledge evolution, and the exchange of historical hot spots showed by papers in Recent Developments in World Seismology fully reflect the past, present and future of seismology. Based on the introduction of scientific communication and the journal publishing model evolution, suggestions such as integrating the scientific resources of the China Earthquake Administration, promoting the intensive publishing, and attracting high-level papers to be initially published in seismic journals are put forward to solve the  “multiple, scattered, and weak”  problem of seismic journals.