Aiming at how to use the food safety standard reference network to find the key standards that have a great impact on food safety inspection and detection from many national food safety standards， a method of finding the important nodes in the food safety standard reference network based on multi-attribute comprehensive evaluation was proposed. Firstly， the importance of standard nodes were evaluated by using the degree centrality， closeness centrality and betweenness centrality in social network analysis as well as the Web page importance evaluation algorithm PageRank respectively. Secondly， the Analytic Hierarchy Process （AHP） was used to calculate the weight of each evaluation index in the importance evaluation， and multi-attribute decision-making method based on TOPSIS （Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution） was used to comprehensively evaluate the importance of standard nodes and found out the important nodes. Thirdly， the important nodes obtained from the comprehensive evaluation and the important nodes obtained from the degree based evaluation were deleted from their own reference network respectively， and the connectivity of the reference networks after deleting the important nodes was tested. The worse the connectivity was， the more important the nodes were. Finally， the Louvain community discovery algorithm was used to test the network connectivity， that is to find the communities of the network nodes. The more nodes not included in the communities， the worse the network connectivity. Experimental results show that after deleting the important nodes found by the comprehensive evaluation method based on multi-attribute， more nodes cannot be included in the communities than those of the evaluation method based on degree， proving that the proposed method can better find the important nodes in the reference network. The proposed method helps standard makers quickly grasp the core contents and key nodes when revising and updating standards， and plays a guiding role in the construction of the system of national food safety standards.