Sustainability is the theme of our time and also the grandest challenge to humanity. As a science that provides the theoretical foundation and practical guidance for sustainable development, sustainability science began to emerge in the beginning of the 21st century and became a hotspot research in global environment change research. Firstly, according to the web of science database from 2006 to 2015 which included the literatures of sustainability science, the paper analyzed the sustainability science’s distribution status, in terms of subject, author, organization etc, by using statistics and visualization. The results show that the quality and influence of the sustainability science research is on a rising trend, mostly specializing in the subject of geography, ecology, environment, or other related topics. Five countries (i.e. Japan, United States, Germany, Australia, and Canada) and research institutions of Tokyo University, United Nations University, Arizona State University, Ibaraki University, Kyoto University, Osaka University, and Chinese Academy of Sciences show great research strengths of sustainability science. Secondly, applying the information visualization software CiteSpace, this paper drew the document co-citation network of sustainability science, and discussed the knowledge base and core authors. Scholars like Komiyama H, Lang D J, Miller T R, Talwar S, Clark W S, etc. and their representative works laid a solid foundation in the establishment of the theoretical elementary knowledge and other related researches. Finally, based on the keywords and burst phrases analysis of co-word and word frequency, this paper drew the evolution network of sustainability science research hotspots, and explored the frontier proposition research of climate change, management, sustainability, framework, adaptation, vulnerability, resilience and so on. Knowledge base of sustainability science research mainly includes the “discipline development”, “interdisciplinary research”, “planning mechanism”, “disaster management”, “information management”, “island environment”, “coastal vulnerability assessment”, “land use”, and “landscape”.