As a trend of modern service industry, self-service has been widely concerned by all walks of life, but there is a lack of literature on systematic management of the overall research in this field. Recently, people's lifestyle has been forced to change due to the influence of COVID-19, while there have been some changes in the field of self-service research. Based on the Web of Science data source, this study takes the literature of self-service field before and after the outbreak of COVID-19 as the research object, and summarizes the development process, research status and future research trend of self-service field through the Citespace visualization tool. The research shows that firstly, academic circles continue to be enthusiastic about self-service field research, cooperation between countries is becoming more and more diversified. Secondly, the communication between researchers is becoming more and more intensive, and the cooperation between different disciplines gradually becomes the mainstream. Third, related research gradually shifted to the practical application of technology, the research perspective gradually shifted from the initial traditional retail perspective industries such as tourism services. Finally, the role of customer experience and participation beh...