Abstract:  With the development of more than 40 years of the reform and opening-up policy, China's service economy has made historic progress. The GDP of China's tertiary industry's contribution rate to the national economy is more than 50%. Thus, China is marching into the service economy era, and the development direction of China's service economy is gradually changing from high-speed development to high-quality development. With it, the service marketing theory is constantly evolving, and profound changes take place in the background of The Times. This paper aims to review and map the research streamline, provide future insights into service marketing in China in the past 30 years, and depict a panorama of service marketing research in China by applying statistical analysis and literature analysis tool CiteSpace. It shows the critical areas of service marketing research institutions and the leading network of cooperation between scholars. Furthermore, we extract the essential research topics and reveal the main direction by establishing the "creation—delivery—improvement" service value chain.

Key words: service marketing, literature review, "creation--delivery--improvement" service value chain, Citespace