Abstract: The construction of rural ecological civilization is one of the important contents of rural revitalization. CiteSpace V visualization and quantitative methods were used to analyze the development of rural ecological civilization in China in the past 20 years, and the hot research direction and existing problems in this research field are expounded. Corresponding suggestions are given which will have important reference to the future development of rural ecological civilization in China. The results show that the research on rural ecological civilization can be divided into three stages: initial development, slow growth and rapid growth; By investigation it is found that the highest number (412) of papers are related to ecological civilization construction, accounting for 26.10 % of the total. Beijing Forestry University ranked the first in the number of papers issued; Through the analysis of the key words emergence map, it is concluded that the key word emergence intensity of "Rural Revitalization" (28.28) ranked the first and is consistent with the number of papers published in the construction of rural ecological civilization followed by "Rural Revitalization Strategy" with the emergence intensity of 9, indicating that the research on rural revitalization has attracted the attention of Chinese scholars since 2018. The following problems were found by the investigation and suggestions are proposed:Imbalance of rural ecological civilization focused researches. It is suggested that the later researches should be balanced, with comprehensive and coordinated researches.In the organization co-occurrence map, the institutions were lacking of cooperation and exchange, so that, the cooperation and exchange of all related institutions should be strengthened, and jointly improved.The involvement of universities was not enough, so that, universities should take their advantage on talent think tanks to play more important role for providing better conrtributions to the construction of rural ecological civilization in China.The relevant representative literatures of each cluster are mostly out of date with low reference value for the current rural ecological civilization construction and rural revitalization strategy. The later researches should bring forth new ideas and methods on the basis of the previous research. In short, the development of rural economy should not be at the expense of ecological environment, but should vigorously develop rural characteristic industries, pay attention to rural personnel training, and make overall planning, which is conducive to the development of rural ecological civilization.

Key words: CiteSpace V, information visualization and quantification, knowledge map, rural ecological civilization