The economic evaluation of fossil energy exploration and development is the basis to ensure the sustainable development of enterprises. In this paper, by adopting the method of bibliometrics and visualization, based on the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) periodical library, the frequency of the date of publication, source journals, authors, institutions and keywords of the research papers are extracted using Matlab programming, and by the way of co-word analysis, the co-occurrence matrices of the authors, institutions and keywords are established. Finally, with the help of the network clustering figures generated by VOSviewer,the cooperation networks of the authors and institutions are analyzed. The integrated analysis of the keywords is based on item density visualization. On the whole, attention has been paid to the economic evaluation of unconventional resources such as coalbed methane and shale gas. From the perspective of the analysis of cooperative relationship networks, in the future highly influential researchers in universities and research institutes should optimize the allocation of resources, focus on strengthening communication, strive for more cross-border cooperation, and further implement the transformation of scientific and technological achievements, so that the economic evaluation of China's fossil energy exploration and development can provide valuable information for scientific decision-making.