There are a vast amount and diversified types of wetlands in China. Establishment of national wetland parks is an important measure to protect wetlands. By analyzing the key topics, current focuses and development trend of research on national wetland park, this paper attempts to provide a theoretical and practical basis for the protection and rational utilization of wetlands and construction of national wetland parks in China. We used bibliometric methods and software of CiteSpace 6.1.R3 to analysis keyword co-occurrence relationship, keyword clustering, keyword timeline map, burst keywords, author cooperation network and research institution cooperation network of 1285 relevant Chinese publications published from 2004—2022 were first retrieved from China National Knowledge Infrastructure Database. The development trend of research on national wetland park is analyzed according to the variation of yearly numbers of publications, the themes and main contents of research on national wetland park were analyzed by using keyword co-occurrence knowledge map and keyword cluster map, and the present characteristics, hot spots and development trend of research on national wetland park were analyzed by using maps of keyword timeline and keyword burst time. The cooperative research of scholars and institutions engaged in research on national wetland park were analyzed by using authors" cooperative network map and the affiliated institutions" cooperative network map. The results showed that the research on national wetland parks focuses on various tpoics, including national wetland park planning and designing, wetland vegetation, aquatic plants, vascular plant flora, diversity of plant and bird species, wetland ecosystem service value estimation, analysis and evaluation of landscape pattern, sustainable development model, ecotourism, wetland conservation and problems, impact of human activities on wetland biodiversity, ecological and engineering measures of wetland conservation, measures for science popularization, education and nature education to promote the protection and rational use of wetlands in national wetland parks. Wetland biodiversity, wetland landscape pattern analysis, landscape planning and management optimization, plant flora, bird diversity and dynamic changes are hot issues in current research. The research did not analyze quantitatively the foreign publications of research on national wetland park, and the quantitative analysis of the frontier issues of national wetland park research is not comprehensive enough. In addition, the personal subjective factors exist inevitably when the retrieved publications are manually screened again and the duplicated or irrelevant publications are eliminated, which may affect the accuracy of quantitative analysis of publications to a certain extent, and which need to be further improved.