Aims: Using text mining techniques to investigate the understudied publication trend and thematic areas in the Confucius Business Ethics relating publications. Methods: Research articles which were published during 1999–2016, were searched in 10 business relating databases on April 9, 2017; resulting a total of 488 articles were included. The titles and abstracts were extracted for the text mining analysis using SAS Text Miner, themes were identified by the Text Topic Node. Publication trend, clustering and associations between themes were analyzed. Results: Eight groups of themes were identified. During 1999–2016, the appearance of the Themes “Confucius Leadership”, “Competitive Advantage”, “Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)", and “Satisfaction and Health” was continuously increasing; meanwhile, research relating to “Chinese Economy” was continuously decreasing; there was a fluctuation trend in that of “Global Ethics”, “Moral and Human Right”, and “Asian Studies”. In the cluster analysis, three main clusters of themes were classified: “Ethics and Leadership”, “Competition and Economy in Asia”, and “CSR and Satisfaction”. Besides, the appearance of “Confucius Leadership” and “Global Ethics”, “Confucius Leadership” and “Moral & Human Right”, “Asia” and “Competitive Advantage”, and “Asia” and “CSR" was positively associated; whereas, that of “Global Ethics” and “China Economy” was negatively associated. Conclusion: The research of Confucius Business Ethics has been focusing on Eastern and Western cross-cultural business ethics, the Confucius ethics and CSR, which was associated with leadership, moral and human rights, in the Global and Asian environments. A call for future research in “Global Ethics” and “China Economy” were suggested.