As the core content of ideological and political education in the new era， patriotism education in universities has always been an important research theme in the field of higher education. After two decades of development， the research on patriotism education in universities has achieved relatively rich research results. In order to fully understand the current situation and historical process of patriotism education research in colleges and universities， this study uses CiteSpace software to visually analyze the literature on patriotism education in universities in the CNKI database， starting and ending from 2001 to 2021. Through bibliometric analysis and visualized knowledge graphs， the publication time of the literature， authors， research institutions， journal citations and keyword clustering are analyzed. The study found that there are many researchers who pay attention to patriotism education， but they are scattered， and there is a lack of scholars who focus on this research field； the research disciplines are mainly concentrated in the field of ideological and political education， and there is a lack of academic exchanges and cooperation between research institutions； The research methods are relatively traditional， and there are relatively few empirical studies.