“Compulsory Education Curriculum Standards (2011 Edition)” proposes to make “symbol consciousness” one of the ten core concepts of mathematics, which shows that symbol awareness has become an important part of mathematical literacy. This paper uses the literature analysis method and bibliometric method, combined with the knowledge graph drawn by CiteSpace software, to analyze the mathematical symbol awareness in the past ten years, and found that the study of symbol awareness presents four characteristics: First, the research of mathematical symbol awareness takes colleges and universities as the main research body, attracting a large number of front-line teachers, and the overall trend of increasing research results is presented, but the research is scattered and has not yet formed a research group. Second, the research on mathematical symbol consciousness mainly focuses on the three aspects of understanding research, training strategies, and element composition. The focus is on theoretical research, and there are still a lot of gaps and fillable places in practical research, especially in the investigation of the current situation of symbol consciousness. Third, the research of mathematical
symbol awareness in China is biased towards the primary school stage, but the practical research is
biased towards the middle and high schools, and has not yet formed a coherent study of the integration
of primary and secondary schools, which is an obstacle to the overall formation of the core literacy of the symbol awareness of students in the compulsory education stage. Fourth, the awareness of mathematical symbols in primary and secondary schools in China lacks evaluation standards, and symbol awareness, as a curriculum goal, lacks detailed evaluation standards.