Urban metabolism is long-term regarded as a hot topic in the research field of urban sustainability, and it's well-running provides an important guarantee for urban development and residents' livelihood. The improvement in metabolic efficiency helps to alleviate the contradictions of urban resource utilization and environmental protection. This research firstly analyzed the worldwide progresses in the research of urban metabolic efficiency over past 30 years, and then summarized the research hotspots of metabolic efficiency accompanied with indicators selection for integrated efficiency evaluation. Take the populous Shenzhen city in China as case study, which is regarded as the hotspots for urban metabolism research, and the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model was adopted to evaluate the integrated efficiency of urban metabolism. The results showed that: (1) The booming in urban metabolism research were emerging in the past 30 years, which contributed most by China, especially in 2011-2020, followed by America, England and Italy. Research on urban metabolic efficiency mainly focused on the urban metabolism of energy, water resources, carbon element, nitrogen element and durable substances (mainly building materials) and their environmental effects. (2) Based on the evaluation of the integrated efficiency concerning above factors, the integrated efficiency of Shenzhen's urban metabolism presented fluctuated. In most years, the urban metabolic processes have achieved efficient operations, which were reflected by efficiency value >1, but there still existed inefficient years, including 2006 (efficiency value=0.96), 2007 (efficiency value=0.76), 2011 (efficiency value=0.85) and 2013 (efficiency value=0.97), and the integrated efficiency of urban metabolism in Shenzhen has not been significantly improved during the study period. In terms of the benefit outputs from the process of resource inputs, the utilization efficiency of water resource in Shenzhen still needs to be improved. Based on current level of resource consumption, it is potential for Shenzhen to further rise economic benefits. However, the efficiencies of reductions in carbon and nitrogen emissions, as well as construction wastes, have been improved to a certain extent during study period. (3) Hotspots identification in the research of urban metabolism efficiency can clear elements of urban metabolism for the integrated efficiency evaluation, which contributes to the practical of integrated efficiency evaluation with the established evaluation system. The case study showed that the feasibility of integrated efficiency evaluation of urban metabolism to reveal the dynamic in overall resources use efficiency in a city, aiming at providing scientific reference for the assessment of urban sustainability towards national sustainable development.