With the data sources of 22,422 papers on grey system theory between 1982 to 2022 retrieved from the Engineering Science and Technology I and II series in the CNKI database, this paper has firstly employed bibliometric method and two visual analysis tools, CiteSpace and SATI, to analyze the research trends, local re? search hotspots and cooperative research situations from the four dimensions: post trend, authors, research insti? tutions and literature sources; secondly, the research hotspots and evolution process in the past 40 years have been studied by clustering and the co-occurrence of keywords; lastly, the possible future development trend of theories and methods related with grey system is analyzed in this paper by using the keyword emergence map.