Objectives Natural landscape evaluation is the systematic and comprehensive investigation and assessment of natural landscape resources, with the goal of gaining a comprehensive understanding of the values, characteristics, and significance of these resources to human society via multidisciplinary knowledge and methods.

Methods In order to gain insight into the current state of research on natural landscape evaluation in China's diverse protected areas, this study employed bibliometrics to systematically organise the Chinese literature included in the China Knowledge Network Infrastructure (CNKI) from 1995 to 2024. This enabled the identification of research hotspots and trends in this field, as well as a summary of current natural landscape evaluation methodologies and their limitations.

Results The research on natural landscape evaluation in China has gone through three distinct phases: an initial period of development, a subsequent period of slow growth, and a recent period of exponential growth. The research focused mainly on three key areas: the evaluation of the degree of beauty, the evaluation of ecotourism resources, and the evaluation of landscape characteristics in urban parks, wetland parks and national parks. The evaluation methods were diverse and had their own characteristics. However, it was difficult to meet the demand for comprehensive evaluations through public aesthetics, keyword clustering and traditional multi-factor integrated evaluation methods. This has prompted researchers to turn to the construction of a more comprehensive and diversified integrated evaluation system, such as Landscape Character Assessment (LCA), Visual Management System (VMS), and other advanced evaluation systems, which have demonstrated unique advantages in large- and medium-scaled regional landscape evaluation.

Conclusions Therefore, it is recommended that future research should focus on the integrated utilization of multiple evaluation methods, achieving dynamic evaluation processes, actively integrating innovative technologies to promote continuous improvement and optimization of research methodologies for natural landscape evaluation. This will eventually facilitate the construction of protected areas with national parks as the main body.