The public rail transport system in cities can promote physical urban transition, resulting in land use and land cover change, changing the public daily behaviors and consequently bringing huge economic benefits to its imminent areas. Based on statistical analysis and visualization tools, this study, used Citespace and Google Earth, explored approximately 455 papers from Web of Science and 321 papers from CNKI, to obtain current research trends in assessments of the impacts of public rail transport on land use change. The literature classification, organization and comments on such current studies and hot research topics are valuable for future research. Three conclusions were then drawn: First of all, similar topics have been done by both domestic and oversea scholars, but from slightly different perspective and at different scales. Secondly, public rail transport often caused increasing in housing price for both residential and commercial blocks; the influence on population density is more significant in the outskirts than the counterparts of downtown areas, but the influence often emerged with a with a unfixed time lag. Thirdly, RS,GIS and GPS(3S) techniques are a promising tools for the research of the impacts of public rail transport on land use change in the era of "big data". Based on the conclusions, four suggestions are proposed: Firstly, future research in this field will be more comprehensive and humanistic studies. Secondly, oversea development models could not be fully applied in China, and thus corresponding improvements with China’s situation are required. Thirdly, theoretically speaking, bicycle sharing can expand the service range of public rail transport. Fourthly, reasonable buffers are important to obtain fine statistical area of land change affected by public rail transport.