Wetland, as one of the most important natural ecosystem in the world, performs various ecological funcations including water resource conservation, biodiversity maintenance, climate regulatiion, carbon sink, and food supply. However, as the intensified climate change and rising stress from human activities, global wetlands have been undergoing unprecedented degradation in the past decades, and turned into one of the most seriously threatened ecosystems. Thus, researche on the wetlands restoration receives more and more attention worldwide.In past few decades, despite there were a mass of publications, the research hotspots and development trends of the wetlands restoration are still lack of systematic analysis. In our study, the CiteSpace.5.5R2, a widely used bibliometrics program, was employed to performe a visualized analysis of the published papers on the wetlands restoration based on CNKI and Web of Science databases. We analyzed the number of papers, the author groups, published organizations, co-citation of literatures, high-frenquency keywords and their burst of the wetlands restoration. The results showed that: 1) the annual quantity of domestic and overseas articles about wetlands restoration presented an increasing trend and a markedly phase of development. The starting of the wetlands restoration research in China was ten year behind these in foreign countries, but developed rapidly. And, the international influence of domestic researches has continuously improved. 2) The domestic and overseas researches has formed relatively stable research teams and institutions. The foreign research institutions were dominated by the United States Geological Survey, Louisiana State University, University Florida, University Wisconsin, which are all American. William JM-John WD, Zedler JB, Jos TA Verhoeven-Leon P M Lamers, Jeffrey WM were paramount foreign research teams. Meanwhile, the dominated research institutions in China included the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Normal University, and Chinese Academy of Forestry. While the dominated research teams included Cui Baoshan-Bai Junhong, Lv Xianguo-Jiang Ming, Tong Shouzheng-Xue Zhenshan and Li Wei-Cui Lijuan-Zhang Manyin , and so on. 3) There were three key stages of the development of researches on the wetlands restoration. The first was the initial exploratory phase with a view to water environment treatment. The second stage was systematicly functional restoration, which paid much more attention to process evaluation of the wetlands restoration. The current stage was the protection and restoration of wetland esosystems for replying enhanced human activities and climate change. Unitl now, global theoretical system of wetlands restoration has evolved, and the topics of which are more distinct 4) The hot spots of the international wetland restoration research are different in different stages. The core points included hydrology and water environment recovery, vegetation restoration and plant community succession, the constructed wetland treatment of water pollution, biodiversity restoration, ecosystem management and evaluation. In recent ten years, the research topic was the impacts of climate change on coastal wetlands and their ecological response. With the similar research interests to foreign studies, domestic researchers have conducted sophisticated theoretical and technical study on wetlands restoration in the Northeast Plain, the Three-River Headwaters and the Yellow River Delta in China. 5) Compared with the international researches, the domestic research should pay more attention on long-term wetland restoration process monitoring, succession and control of plant community succession, hydrological regulation and model prediction, and ecosystem management. It should complete the theoretical framework for wetlands restoration that adapted to the characteristics of geographical environment in China as soon as possible. At precent, the wetlands restoration is still in a period of rapid development, and its scope and depth are continuously reinforced. In the future, wetland restoration, protection and process monitoring under the dual disturbance of climate change and human activities will remain the focus of wetland science for a long time.