As a unique geographical unit formed after the construction of the Three Gorges Project, the Three Gorges Reservoir Area is of great significance for local land use and sustainable ecological development. Based on Citespace software and traditional literature induction methods, this paper analyzes the overall characteristics, hot spot evolution, main content, existing problems and deficiencies of literature. We found that: (1) the number of Chinese and English publications related to land use and ecological environment effects continued to increase, the influence of the field was enhanced, and the research had the multidisciplinary and intersectional characteristics. (2) The study has experienced three periods from 1990 to 2005, 2006 to 2014 and 2015 to 2022: the first stage focused on land consolidation and land ecological protection; the second stage focused on the extinction zone and the topographic gradient effect of land use change; the third stage focused on the social-economic ecological coupling and ecosystem services of landscape pattern change, which is consistent with the development of the reservoir area and regional policies. (3) The main concerned contents of the head of the reservoir area, the hinterland of the reservoir aera, and the end of the reservoir area were different: the research on the head of the reservoir area was mainly based on ecological risk assessment and ecosystem services; the hinterland of the reservoir area focused on the social-ecological and economic coupling of slope cultivated land change; due to the large number of construction land, the end of the reservoir area was studied under the background of land consolidation and regional planning. (4) Land use change shifted from focusing on single element to multi-factor and multi-functional research, and the driving factor research shifted from qualitative analysis to qualitative and quantitative combined analysis. Since the implementation of environmental policies such as returning cultivated land to forest, regional ecosystem services have shown an overall upward trend, and the ecological risk index has decreased significantly. The research content of the ecological environmental effects of land use was more diversified. (5) The current research is facing problems such as data, methods, and index system construction, and needs to be explored from various aspects such as theoretical construction, method innovation, and practical application in the future.