The development of petroleum energy is related to a country's industrialization level and international competitiveness.Analyzing the development trend and research hotspot of petroleum engineering can provide scholars and institution with scientific research basis and strategic reference.Taking the Web of Science as the data source, this paper employed bibliometrics method to visual analysis the relevant documents published in the period of 2008 to 2018 from the perspectives of publication volume, major research institutions, core authors and research hotspots.The results show that the number of documents issued has been increasing in the past decade.Publications are concentrated in countries such as China, the United States and Russian.At present, the research of this discipline is focusing on enhanced oil recovery, hydraulic fracturing, heavy oil development, unconventional oil and gas resources, reservoir numerical simulation, and crude oil desulfurization.Machine learning and unconventional reservoir development will be the research frontier of oil and gas engineering in the future.