In recent years, there has been a surge in international research literature on ecological security. With intensifying global change and human actions, this research field has been profoundly transformed. While research on ecological security is multitargeted, multilevel, and multidisciplinary, revealing integrated and complex characteristics, fuzzy and controversial issues have persisted. The use of traditional and current methods for researching publications is limited when applied to large quantities of literature, because they are qualitative, non-visual, and manual. This paper focuses the application of CitespaceⅡ, which is a visualization tool for conducting both quantitative and qualitative citation network analysis of visual literature reviews. We used this tool to analyze classical literature and literature with a research focus on this field, documenting the association of a co-citation network with a keyword co-appearance network. We applied three methods available in CitespaceⅡ to examine the evolutionary trajectory of research topics and their development trends. These methods included keyword frequency analysis, document clustering analysis, and the burst detection algorithm. The use of these methods enabled us to identify causative factors in the development of research topics. We conducted scientific knowledge mapping to analyze and locate research and scholarship studies on ecological security globally. These are three factors: (1) different stages of human civilization, (2) patterns of international politics and the global economy, and (3) the level of research on subjects that are formative at different stages of ecological security research and the evolution of research themes. Our results showed that this research field has undergone three procedural phases from the initial stage of asking questions and forming concepts, to the research development stage, and finally in-depth research. Seminal literature has emerged during these different stages of research. Our study revealed two types of ecological security research topics. The first type was relatively stable and endured through all three study phases. The second was characterized as periodic research hot spots in a changing global situation. This type, which is currently less prominent, includes new environmental problems and concepts, in addition to emerging technological applications. The evolution characteristic of themes conformed to the Hype Cycle Theory. Globalization, biodiversity, ecological agriculture and agricultural intensification, resilience, and vulnerability represent research hotspots in the field of ecological security at present. Guaranteeing basic human survival and development needs, as well as human adaptations and responses to environmental change, are important future directions for ecological security research. Whereas research on human survival and development centers on interactions between food security, climate change, and natural resources security, the focus of research on human adaptations and responses to environmental change is on ecological prevention and restoration, policy management and tradeoffs, and technological progress. Visualization of citation analysis through the processing of prolific citation data enables us to observe and understand the literature content more easily, and to discover hidden rules and patterns in the data. Creating knowledge maps is becoming increasingly popular, with information visualization tools providing a useful supplementary method to traditional literature reviews.