With the rapid development of social economy, smart cities have brought more benefits to people's lives. In order to understand the current research status and development trends of smart cities at home and abroad, CiteSpace software is used to visualize the number of publications, authors, keywords and development trends of 1000 documents from 2013 to 2023 in the two databases of China National Knowledge Infrastructure and Web of Science. The results show that: 1) From the analysis of the number of publications, the number of publications about "smart city" has increased steadily; 2) According to the authors' analysis, the cooperation between different researchers and institutions is not close enough, and more contact needs to be made in the future development of the literature on "smart cities"; 3) From the keyword analysis, the keywords of the research in the related fields of "smart city" are related to big data, which indicate that the research on "smart city" is innovative to a certain extent. Chinese scholars are good at conducting research and discussion from multiple perspectives, and the discussion is innovative; while foreign scholars are more realistic and conduct research from the perspective of people's livelihood services; 4) From the analysis of future development trends, it is necessary to pay attention to the development of data and information technology, as well as the relationship between the construction of smart cities and people's livelihood. The research results provide a basis and research ideas for scholars in this field, and provide references for the government to formulate policies related to smart city construction.