For nearly forty years, the concepts, theories, and methods of sustainable development have continued to develop, and become one of the key issues that concern today's society around the world. In order to get a sense of how research on sustainable development has evolved in different disciplines, we carried out a cross-database search of published articles with keywords of “ecology”, “economics”, “sociology” and “sustainable development”, using the CNKI network platform. Search results from 1995 to 2011 from six databases were then analyzed to identify research trends and directions. Our results indicate that sustainable development research in ecology, economics, and social science all has become increasingly interdisciplinary, integrative, multi-dimensional, multi-scaled, and quantitative. Ecology highlights research method.