Resilience is an important concept in the cancer literature and is a salient indicator of cancer survivorship. Classic theory test (CTT) and item response theory (IRT) were performed to develop and validate the 25-item Resilience Scale Specific to Cancer (RS-SC). This study was designed to develop and validate a short form of RS-SC (RS-SC-10) with a multidimensional IRT (MIRT) analysis. MIRT analysis was performed to test two models (three- and five-factor) derived from previous studies and assess the item parameters of RS-SC and RS-SC-10. A total of 451 Chinese patients with different cancer diagnoses were analyzed. The three-factor structure showed better goodness of fit compared with the five-factor structure in RS-SC. RS-SC-10 retained 10 items with high discriminative parameters from RS-SC and consisted of two factors, Generic and Shift-Persist. Item information function indicated that RS-SC-10 had the highest discrimination ability among patients with low to moderate levels of resilience. MIRT provided useful information on RS-SC and RS-SC-10 by combining the approaches of CTT and IRT. RS-SC-10 showed great potential in clinical settings owing to the low scale of burden on patients. More studies on the Minimum Clinically Important Difference of RS-SC-10 are warranted. Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.