Stellar spectra are characterized by obvious absorption lines or absorption bands, while those with emission lines are usually special stars such as cataclysmic variable stars (CVs), HerbigAe/Be etc. The further study of this kind of spectra is meaningful. The present paper proposed a new method to identify emission line stars (ELS) spectra automatically. After the continuum normalization is done for the original spectral flux, line detection is made by comparing the normalized flux with the mean and standard deviation of the flux in its neighbor region. The results of the experiment on massive spectra from SDSS DR8 indicate that the method can identify ELS spectra completely and accurately. Since no complex transformation and computation are involved in this method, the identifying process is fast and it is ideal for the ELS detection in large sky survey projects like LAMOST and SDSS.