Abstract: Based on two prestigious journals in the field of health communication, this paper adopt Mapping knowledge domain to outline the history and current situation of global health communication research over the past 20 years. It is found that over the past 20 years, the research topics of health communication mainly focus on audience research and effect research, but hot topics have been keep changing with social reality. Due to the absorb medical methods, the research methods have become pluralistic. In terms of research main force, the United States is in a leading position in the global research pattern, but Chinese researchers are emerging as new participant. From the perspective of high cited journals and high co-cited literature, health communication research has showed two different orientations, it named "communication orientation" and "medical orientation". Compared with the evolution trend of international health communication research, the breakthrough points of future health communication research in China include: pay more attention to the special groups such as LGBT population and hypochondriasis; focus on the online health behavior practice, attaches great importance to the health education for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, lay stress on the humanistic medical traditions such as narrative medicine.