Abstract: To find out the present situation and development trend of antibiotic pollution characteristics in the water environment, based on the related literature information on the distribution characteristics of antibiotic pollution in the water environment published in Web of Science (WoS) database from 2000 to 2020, the annually published papers, citation frequency, authors, countries, institutions, journals, and keywords were analyzed by bibliometrics, the research progress in this field in the past 20 years was analyzed, and some suggestions for future development were put forward. The results showed that there were 3 312 papers published in the field of antibiotic pollution characteristics in the water environment from 2000 to 2020. The number of papers published annually showed an increasing trend. The literature covered 108 countries worldwide, and the number of published articles in China was 1 208, accounting for 36.46% of the total. Antibiotic resistanc, diversity and drinking water were keywords with high intermediary centrality and were also the core contents of antibiotic pollution research. Science of the Total Environment and Environmental Science and Pollution Research were the main periodical carriers of literature in this field. In recent years, the research on resistance genes' influence on aquatic ecosystem and their migration characteristics in the food chain were hot issues.