Abstract:Metal 3D printing is the crown of the modern manufacturing industry, the identification of metal 3D printing technology opportunities for rapidly improving the core competitiveness of China's manufacturing industry is of great significance. Mainly based on the Web of Science technology papers and Derwent patent documents, the use of SATI, SPSS and other analysis tools to extract text keywords and construct different co-occurrence matrix, multidimensional clustering method is used to identify the hot topics of research. On the basis of inheriting and developing the theory of the opportunity of Naoki Shibata technology, by comparing the technical papers and patent literature to study the differences in hot topics to identify the metal 3D printing technology opportunities. The research results show that there are 4 respectively research hot topics in scientific and technical papers and patent documents, and there are a total of 4 kinds of technical opportunities in the top 2 categories. This paper is the first time to study the technical opportunity of metal 3D printing based patent and scientific paper, which opens up the research field of vision, and it plays an important guiding role in the enterprise strategic decision making in the metal 3D printing industry.