Abstract: In order to deeply understand the current situation and hot spots of animal-derived active peptides both at home and abroad, a comprehensive bibliometric visual analysis of the animal-derived active peptide research based on the Web of Science and CNKI databases from 2016 to 2020 was performed. With the aim of fully expressing the research status of animal-derived active peptides, the knowledge map was analyzed in terms of time, countries, cooperation among countries, institutions, journal distribution and key words of documents by collecting 1005 articles from CNKI and 2063 articles from Web of Science. The results showed that the research of animal-derived active peptides showed a rapid developing trend, and the amount of English literatures increased year by year, while the Chinese literatures remained stable. There were 84 countries or regions in the world which conducted the research on animal-derived active peptides. China had taken the leading position of this research and frequently cooperated with other countries such as the United States, Germany and India. Furthermore, the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences were the core research institutions. The published journals in Food Science and Scientific Reports were the most popular at home and abroad, respectively. In recent years, the action mechanism of antimicrobial peptides is a hot topic for more and more scholars. In short, the researchers in this field will focus on the immunomodulatory function, the structural identification and their applications in antibiotic resistance of antimicrobial peptides in the future.