Ecological civilization (EC) is a new paradigm for a harmonization between human beings and nature, which was posed to address the ecological crisis caused by the industrial civilization. A number of research milestones have been achieved since the idea was first proposed. However, there has yet to be any systematic classification or summary along a time scale. To illuminate the progress and frontiers made by domestic and international research groups in the field, we conducted a national and regional cooperative network and keyword evolution analysis of related literature on ecological civilization. Simultaneously, the evolutionary trend of the connotation of ecological civilization was combed, and the status quo and deficiencies of the evaluation indicator system and assessment method of ecological civilization construction were analyzed. The study revealed that: (1) China is a key node in national and regional cooperation network of ecological civilization research. One of her researchers declared that ecological civilization was indispensable to both material and spiritual civilization in 1983. We found that 93% of the ecological civilization articles were from China. The betweenness centrality of the node was 0.56, which was much higher than that of other countries. China also played an important leading role in this field. In particular, its influence has been growing more pronounced since 2012. (2) Foreign research has focused more on the introduction of the idea of China’s ecological civilization, and relationships between low-carbon economy, sustainable development, and ecological civilization. (3) Domestic research covered three primary themes: the connotation, evaluation indicator system, and assessment method of ecological civilization. Before 2010, it mainly focused on the definition and expansion of the connotation. At present, the other two topics have become research hotspots. (4) The existing evaluation indicator systems tend to be used for the static assessment of system status, ignoring the long-term and dynamic nature of ecological civilization construction. Related indicator systems released by the Chinese government were applicable to provincial and municipal assessment, lacking the overall assessment at the national scale. There is still a lack of systematic and standardized research on the evaluation method. In the future, the spatiotemporal differentiation of the ecological civilization construction and the corresponding dynamic assessment methods should be of high concern, to improve and enrich the evaluation theory of the ecological civilization construction in combination with such methods as big data.