Urban-rural integration is a crucial issue that demands long-term resolution in China. Promoting its development bears profound strategic significance for addressing the issues concerning agriculture, rural areas and farmers, and an in-depth exploration of the frontiers and hotspots in this field is of great practical value. This paper, with CiteSpace as the analysis tool, takes relevant papers published in the core journals of CNKI from 2016 to 2025 as research samples. It analyzes the hotspots and frontiers in this field by constructing knowledge maps such as co-occurrence and clustering maps of core keywords. The findings are as follows: Firstly, a knowledge system centered on "urban-rural integration" has taken shape, which covers four dimensions, including target value, process and mechanism, emerging driving forces and practical pathways. Secondly, the evolution of research hotspots is highly synchronized with national strategies and technological changes, evolving through three stages of "theoretical construction-strategic response-technological deepening", with the digital economy serving as the pivotal frontier driving the transformation of research paradigms. Thirdly, the digital economy has evolved from an independent research hotspot into a core engine driving the transformation of research frontiers and the deepening of research paradigms; it is steering urban-rural integration research toward a systemic paradigm, deepening from macro narrative to micro mechanism and from strategic interpretation to technological governance. However, the research still has limitations such as inadequate studies at the county scale and insufficient application of interdisciplinary methods. Based on the above findings, this paper proposes that future research should focus on deepening the micro-simulation of factor flow, expanding the inclusive perspective of digital integration, strengthening the design of differentiated paths at the county scale, enhancing interdisciplinary dialogue and theoretical construction, so as to promote the quality and upgrading of research in this field.