The invention discloses an LDA (latent dirichlet allocation) and VSM (vector space model) based similar Chinese herb literature recommendation method. The method includes: adopting an IKAnalyzer to perform word segmentation on topics and summary information of literature on the basis of a terminological dictionary for Chinese herbs, constructing a vector space, performing dimensionality reduction on the vector space, constructing a semantic dictionary, numbering all lexical items in the dictionary in sequence, performing vectorization through each document on the basis of the semantic dictionary, constructing term vectors of each document, utilizing LDA and a Gibbs sampling algorithm to perform training to obtain probability distribution of each document on themes, then computing a value of similarity between every two documents by the aid of KL divergence, computing cosine similarity of the term vectors of each document on the basis of term frequency, performing joint weighting on the two kinds of similarities prior to performing similarity sorting, and then making recommendation. By the method, the literature, similar both in content and theme, in the Chinese herb literature can be recommended to users, and recommendation results are closer to user requirements.