Mapping knowledge domain (MKD) is an important research technology in bibliometrics. It provides a visual perspective for researchers and helps researchers to clearly understand the general situations of specific research fields. Presently, MKD has been widely used in fields such as ecology and transportation safety. In this paper, we conduct a systematically bibliometric analysis of the development trend on urban vitality research by using VOSviewer software, and this work is based on the related articles published in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) between 1998 and 2018. In the implementation, we firstly introduce the annual numbers of articles, source journals, highly cited papers, and production countries relating to urban vitality research. Then, we adopt a keywords co-occurrence analysis to explore the topic distribution, research frontiers, and research trends of urban vitality research intuitively. Overall, the Mapped Knowledge Domain method has proved to be an effective way to assess research trends in specific disciplines and to contribute to researchers and governments with respect to management and decision-making on issues of science.