Abstract: 【Purpose/significance】The emergence of swarm intelligence plays an important role in understanding the laws of nature,optimizing social management, and promoting knowledge innovation. The online community environment provides a new context of re⁃search and application for the emergence of swarm intelligence.【Method/process】This paper conducts a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of domestic and foreign literature, and summarizes the research on the emergence of swarm intelligence in the context of on⁃line communities and their theoretical connotations, influence factors, emergence types, and application scenarios.【Result/conclu⁃sion】The existing research on the emergence of swarm intelligence in the online communities focuses on the analysis and interpreta⁃tion of swarm intelligence, but few on the aspects such as profound causes and motivations. Based on the deficiencies of existing re⁃
search, further studies could be performed on the theoretical discussion, as well as experimental applications in the fields of disruptive technology identification, artificial intelligence, smart cities, and public crisis management.【Innovation/limitation】The combing work in this paper is helpful for a comprehensive understanding of the research on swarm intelligence emergence in online community envi⁃ronments, but it is difficult to give richer supporting evidence for the proposed research direction of swarm intelligence emergence ap⁃plication in online knowledge communities due to the limitation of the existing related application studies.