Karst is a special type of landscape that is formed by the dissolution of soluble rocks and forces the investigators to pay attention to hydrological and ecological problems, karst hazards, karst management, and the sustainability of karst environments, etc. To better explore the research hotspots of karst in 2016, 1472 papers included in the Web of Science (WoS) and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) were collected and the CiteSpace software was used to generate visualizing information for bibliometrics analysis. The frontiers in the karst research can be reflected, which provides the basis information for scholars to achieve concise objectives and find breakthrough innovation in the future. When karst or stalagmite was selected as the key word, 795 SCI papers published in 2016 were collected. The clustering results of key words in 795 papers showed that the main research hotspots were “karst hydrochemistry”, “karst rocky desertification and biogeochemistry”, “climate change and paleoenvironmental reconstruction” and “karst engineering and hazard”. China has made great contributions to these papers on karst research, which reflects the regional comparative advantage on karst research in China, though Chinese scholars are lacking in the tight linkage with scholars from other countries. Moreover, 677 papers were collected when karst or stalagmite was chosen as the key word in CNKI. The clustering data showed that the main research hotspots in CNKI were “karst hydrochemistry”, “karst rocky desertification and biogeochemistry”, “karst oil and gas resources” and “karst engineering and hazard”. From the above results, it was found that domestic and international research hotspots of karst were different.