Under the background of "carbon neutrality", the combination of land use change and carbon sink assessment is getting closer and closer. This combination has been paid attention to by a variety of disciplines, including landscape ecology, human geography, and others, and the cross-study of the two has become a popular research topic in the present day. In order to achieve carbon neutrality and carbon peaking, it is essential to conduct research on land use change and carbon sink assessment. In this paper, we took the core dataset of Web of Science with 3556 English papers and CNKI database with 363 Chinese articles from 2003 to 2023 as the research object, CiteSpace software was utilized in order to create scientific knowledge mapping. The purpose of this article is to reviewed the general situation, as well as research areas and directions, development trend of the combination of land use change and carbon sink assessment. According to the findings of the study, the number of publications in the cross-study of land use change and carbon sink assessment has been increasing year by year over the course of the past twenty years. In accordance with the keyword clustering, the body of existing literature could be divided into three major areas: 1) land use type carbon sink assessment; 2) ecosystem service carbon sink assessment; and 3) soil and vegetation carbon sink assessment. Among them, carbon sink assessment of land use type was the focus of cross-research at the intersection of land use change and carbon sink. The focus of the research has gradually shifted from the study of carbon sink assessment methods to the simulation of carbon sink prediction under climate change and land use change. In terms of research methods, the methods of data analysis for remote sensing have been continuously improved, while the methodologies of artificial intelligence and machine learning have gradually begun to be adopted by an increasing number of scholars. The advantages of interdisciplinary research should be fully utilized in the research that will be conducted in the future. Additionally, the depth and breadth of research in this field should be improved, the comprehensive carbon sink assessment studies should be strengthened, the response to policies should be improved, and recommendations for rational territorial spatial planning should be proposed. Achieving the goals of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality as soon as possible requires a scientific basis and reference, which can be provided by this paper.