PURPOSE The purposes of this paper were to: (1) study the development process of skiing knowledge network and to understand the research focus and development trend of skiing in different periods, and (2) to analyze the sub areas of ski cohesion research. METHOD Using CiteSpace visualization software of bibliometrics, a social network analysis was conducted on a total of 325 papers on 14 sports professional core journals in China Knowledge Network (CNKI) from 1990 to 2019. RESULT The research results showed that the amount of articles on skiing topics has been increased rapidly and the ski research themes change over time. In last 10 years, the main focuses of the research were Winter Olympics, ski tourism, ski industry, freestyle skiing aerials and competitive sports. The Winter Olympics, ice and snow sports and ski industry are the current and future hot research topics and frontiers. The knowledge structure consists of eight theme fields, including Winter Olympics, ski resorts, ice and snow sports, ice and snow industry, ski tourism, sports management, freestyle skiing aerials and snowboarding u-track skiing. CONCLUSION First of all, in the past 30 years, keywords in the field of ski research have undergone great changes. The Winter Olympics and ski industry topics are the current and future key research trends. In-depth research on these two topics will be an important challenge for scholars. Secondly, keyword network analysis provides new ideas and research methods for exploring the structure and development trend of the skiing field.