Abstract: Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are widely used in water treatment due to their excellent properties such as large specific surface area, high porosity, and tunable structure and function. In order to deeply understand the research hotspots and growing trends of MOFs in the field of water treatment applications, the bibliometrics method was used, and the VOSviewer software was used to quantitatively analyze the related papers of MOFs in the field of water treatment applications in the Web of Science^TM core collection database. The results show that: from 1995 to 2021, MOFs published a total of 1 281 papers in the field of water treatment applications, and the number of papers generally increased year by year; China was the country with the highest total number of papers and total citations in this field, with a total of 800, but with relatively low citations per paper; Jhung S H is the most productive author in the field, with 14 published papers and a total of 1 657 citations. The research hotspot is the modification and compound of MOFs materials (such as MOFs-derived carbon, MOFs membrane, etc.), and the use of adsorption removal, catalytic degradation and other methods to treat typical pollution such as dyes and heavy metal ions in water. In the future, attention should be paid to the exploration of inexpensive and efficient synthesis methods, the improvement of material stability and reproducibility, the structure-activity relationship between modification methods and the structural characteristics of pollutants, and the study of the mechanism of action of complexes or derivatives.