Abstract: Ecosystem degradation and increased fragility due to climate change and human activities have attracted worldwide attention, ecological restoration is the main way to restore damaged ecosystems． Effectiveness evaluation of ecological restoration is key to ensure quality and effect of ecological restoration, to provide scientific guidance for improving and perfecting ecological restorations． Such studies at home and abroad are increasing rapidly, but are not systematically reviewed． Web of Science and CNKI databases are analyzed with CiteSpace visual knowledge graph analysis tool with regards to authors, institutions, co-citations and keywords． 1) From 1996 to 2023, the total number of papers in the field showed an overall upward trend, with international papers growing faster． 2) Chinese Academy of Sciences and University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences were the top institutions that published a large number of papers． Beijing Normal University and Northwest A & F University published a large number of papers abroad, while Beijing Forestry University had published many papers domestically． 3) Such researches were divided into three stages: 1996-2005, 2006-2015, and 2016 and beyond, corresponding to early exploration, system improvement and rapid development stages respectively． 4) The coincidence degree and synchrony of keywords of domestic and international papers were not high． In comparison, international research was more diversified, while domestic research topics had expanded in the past two years, especially in the area of overall protection of ecosystems and multi-scale comprehensive evaluation．