Objective To analyze and evaluate the present status of application of clinical pathway evaluation indexes in China, in order to provide references to establish an evaluation system on clinical pathway. Methods Such databases as CBM (2004-2009), VIP (2004-2009), CNKI (2004-2009) and WanFang Data (2004-2009), and some relevant websites were searched systematically for collecting Chinese literature about domestic clinical pathway evaluation indexes. Results Among the 1 175 articles included, 135 (11%) were published in the core periodicals, 19 (2%) were masterate theses, and 1 021 were other kinds of articles. As to 135 core periodical literature and 19 masterate theses, most of which were graded into the second level of evidence, accounting for 96%. The analysis on the appearance of indexes showed that 87% of inconsistency could be identified between the contents and terms of indexes. Common indexes were summarized as the following four aspects: cost index, clinical index, serving index and quality evaluation index. There were 78% of all the 1 175 articles focusing on the application of nursing and medical education, in which only one masterate thesis used social research methods such as Delphi, focus group, experts scoring (percentile), etc. Conclusion Currently, there are some issues existing in the evaluation indexes of clinical pathway in China, such as low methodological quality of literature, irregularly and randomly using statistical terms, and lack of studies on system construction of clinical pathway evaluation indexes.