Abstract: The world is facing serious water resource crisis, and effective water environment management is the key to regional sustainable development. As an important means of governance, environmental regulation has been studied by more and more scholars. Many achievements have been made in this field. A systematic review of the existing literature in this field can provide a scientific basis for subsequent research. Based on CiteSpace, visual knowledge map analysis was performed on water environment regulation literature extracted from Web of Science (WoS) database and CNKI database from 2002 to 2021. The results showed that: 1) The research in WoS database literature started early and developed rapidly, while that in CNKI database literature lagged behind. On the whole, there was little cooperation between domestic and foreign authors in this field, and a close cooperation network existed only among core authors. 2) The current research focused on the command-based water environment regulation dominated by government regulation, while the market incentive and implicit environmental regulation dominated by the market and the public were less involved. The research focused mainly on the regulation of water resources quality and quantity, the influence of external environmental uncertainty on water environment regulation and the improvement of water resources management methods. 3) From the perspective of research trends, the improvement of water pollution and water security was a continuous concern in this field. In addition, in the future, water resource regeneration and utilization would be the focus of water environment regulation research at home and abroad.