Abstract: 【Purpose/significance】Based on citing papers, this paper explores the progress of foreign herd behavior research and re‐
veals the application status and development trend of herd behavior research【. Method/process】Firstly, this paper identifies the paper that proposed the theory of herd behavior as the seed paper and examines the documents in SSCI/SCI which cited this seed paper.Sec‐ondly, it firstly employed the frequency of the keyword statistics analysis to reveal the emphasis and hotpots of herd behavior theory.Then, it used the literature research method and took the contents of the citing papers into account, finding four subject categories of the research progress of foreign herd behavior theory application.Finally, it reviewed the development trend of foreign herd behavior theory application research in these four subject categories.【Result/conclusion】The findings suggested that the progress of foreign herd behavior theory application research mainly includes the following four aspects, including the discrimination of similar concepts of herd behavior, the generation mechanism of herd behavior, a theoretical model of herd behavior, the impacts of herd behavior under different context【. Innovation/limitation】It explores the progress of foreign herd behavior application research from the perspective of citation, which can provide a new lens for the review of herd behavior research and promote the application of herd behavior theory in the field of library and information research better.