To have a deep understanding of the main research directions and evolutionary trends in the social science field of China's distant-water fishery in the past 40 years, and to reveal the hot topics, existing problems, and improvement space, a total of 343 pieces of literature on distant-water fisheries research in CNKI were taken as samples. Eight research topics were extracted by using the dynamic topic model, including cooperative risk assessment, international law influence, development strategic planning, and fishery economic construction as the four hot topics. There are differences in hot topics at different stages of development. The Sankey diagram of the topic evolution path indicates that the strategic planning topic has a significant overall character, technological equipment upgrade is interrelated with fishery economic construction, cooperative risk assessment has an evolutionary relationship with standardized policy management and industrial competitiveness, and the topic of professional talent cultivation continues to receive attention as an independent research path. The two key problems in the research are over-emphasis on empirical studies and under-emphasis on theoretical studies, as well as the lack of multi-disciplinary integration and multi-method integration. Based on the logic, perspective, form, and content, suggestions for improvement are proposed, from alleviating resource pressure to advancing reform and opening up, from passively adapting to rules to actively proposing initiatives, from economic and industrial forms to social and cultural forms, and from resource conservation-embedded forms to green and low-carbon dominant forms.