Abstract:The double pressures of resource shortage and environmental pollution make closed-loop supply chain a new direction of sustainable development theory research paradigm. However, the existing research lacks of a comprehensive review of the massive achievements in the field of closed-loop supply chain. This paper explores the knowledge support, knowledge distribution, emerging trends and structural variation of 837 closed-loop supply chain literatures in Web of Science Core Collection from 2009 to 2018 by using quantitative method. The results show that the National Natural Science Foundation of China is the most important provider of knowledge production in the field of closed-loop supply chain, and high-quality academic journals provide the main source of knowledge for the scientific research work of closed-loop supply chain. Closed-loop supply chain research results are widely distributed in operations research, management science, environmental sciences and other disciplines, and its knowledge crystallization is very prominent in the cross-disciplinary distribution. Consumer cognition, knowledge integration, network design, pricing decision-making, member coordination and circular economy are emerging research trends in the field of closed-loop supply chain in recent five years. High-yielding authors and their variability literature have bridged the scientific research work in the field of closed-loop supply chain in the past ten years, and provided effective ideas for researchers to quickly obtain key information from a large number of literature data.