Purpose/Significance To analyze the status quo of the construction of textbook on medical information retrieval, and provide optimal suggestions for the development of medical information retrieval textbook. Method/Process Adopting the bibliometrics method, the paper takes Duxiu, Chaoxing Huiya and National Digital Library of China as retrieval platforms to explore the medical information retrieval textbooks published from 1984 to 2022 in terms of the main contents, author team, publishing and usage status. Result/Conclusion The medical information retrieval textbooks have stagnant cognition of medical information literacy, lack of ideological and political elements in curriculum and outdated teaching cases. In the future, attention should be paid to the extension of medical information literacy concept in the emerging digital health environment, the update of teaching cases and the mining and integration of ideological and political elements.