Tourism development is of great significance to the sustainable livelihoods of local residents. Tourism has been increasingly used for, and directly linked with, rural poverty reduction in developing countries. In recent years, it has, however, been criticized by rural developers for its lack of concern for the rural poor and for being too increasingly focused on tourism specifically. Instead, it is argued that these inadequacies can be addressed by the livelihoods approach. According to the web of science database from 1994 to 2016 which included the literature of tourism and livelihood, the paper analyzed its hotspot, literature cluster, cooperation network and so on by using visualization software CiteSpace and Carrot2. The results show that scholars are mainly from the perspective of environmental science, ecology, management, and geography or other related topics. Rural tourism, protected area tourism, cultural tourism, and marine tourism are the main topics of the tourism and livelihood research. Knowledge base of tourism and livelihood research mainly includes protected area governance, cost-effectiveness, rural tourism and rural development.