Driven by the development of the information retrieval technologies, image retrieval has been studied for more than several decades. This study centers on revealing the current status and future directions of image retrieval based on reviewing previous related studies. The citation-based analysis was applied to 2243 articles retrieved from Web of Science database. The time series plots of the citation relationships between the retrieved articles reveal a fundamental research article that lay the foundation for the image retrieval field. Co-citation analysis identifies that the existing studies formed two clusters. Each cluster represents one of the two major areas in the field of image retrieval: the text-based image retrieval and the content-based image retrieval. The visualization map shows that the research of content-based image retrieval has received more attention than the area of text-based image retrieval. Relevance feedback was identified as a promising research direction for the future study
