Abstract: 【Purpose/significance】 The reports of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China pointed out that building the ecological civilization was the millennium plan for the sustainable development of the Chinese nation. By combing the research hotspots and stage changes of ecological civilization in China, it would provide reference for the future research in the field of ecological civilization. 【Method/Process】 By taking 2163 research papers related to “ecological civilization” included in CSSCI database from 2000 to 2021 as the object, the CiteSpace software was used to conduct the visual analysis from the perspectives of annual number of published papers, discipline distribution, author, institutions publishing articles and research topics. 【Results/Conclusion】 The results showed that the research on ecological civilization has gradually become a research hotspot in the academic circle, which has undergone four stages of changes, and the research mainly focused on two aspects of theoretical exploration and the research of construction. However, the research disciplines of ecological civilization were relatively concentrated, without forming a core group of authors, and there were few empirical studies. In the future, it was necessary to further broaden the research field of ecological civilization and deepen the research on the construction of ecological civilization.