In the context of global climate change, more and more scientists and research institutions in worldwide focused on the topic of carbon-water coupling of terrestrial ecosystem. Based on the papers in database of Web of Science Core Collection, a literature analysis on carbon-water coupling of terrestrial ecosystem was conducted using CiteSpace, a software for visualizing and analyzing trends and patterns in scientific literature. The purpose of this work is to explore the hot issues of carbon-water coupling of terrestrial ecosystem and its developing trends in future on the basis of the worldwide evolution of topics and the current status of this research. The results indicated that (1) the number of research papers on carbon-water coupling of terrestrial ecosystem showed a rapid increase from 1999 to 2018, and the number in the late 10 years increased faster than that in the previous 10 years. Three scholars, including Black TA, Yu GR and Chen JQ, were the core author group with a large number of articles. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, US Forest Service, University of California at Berkeley, Oregon State University, etc. were the major research institutions publishing papers in the field of carbon-water coupling of terrestrial ecosystem. (2) The research field, including environmental sciences & ecology, ecology, environmental sciences, meteorology & atmospheric sciences, forestry, agriculture, water resources and remote sensing were convered in the field of carbon-water coupling of terrestrial ecosystem in terms of co-citation journals, and this phenomenon reflected that the research of carbon-water coupling of terrestrial ecosystem were comprehensive and cross-disciplinary science. (3) In the context of global climate change, the current research on the coupling relationship between carbon and water of terrestrial ecosystem was mainly based on the flux observation station. Combined with model simulation, stable isotope technology, eddy covariance technology and other research methods, the research scale changed from the single flux site to joint multi-point networking. The lastly research focused on building a larger scale of carbon-water resource evaluation model based on the methods of GIS, remote sensing, model simulation, and so on. To expand and develop the spatial scale of this research and explore the variation law on the time scale was predicted to be the emerging research hot in recent years.