A content analysis was conducted to study the use of theory in 1,822 research articles published on the Journal of the China Society for Scientific and Technical Information between 2000 and 2013. Four coding schemas for subjects, article types, theory positions and types of theory use were developed and each article was coded according to these coding schemas. Then the use of theory and its distributions on subjects,article types,theory positions,theory use types and time were analyzed. The research results were compared with foreign studies and a few characteristics and deficiencies of Chinese information science research in theory use and development were discussed.