Abstract: The distribution of geographic regions and institutions for the published papers regarding to ecological economics was analyzed by making use of the newly developed information visualization methods,and the co-citation data records retrieved from Web of Science(SCI,SSCI,AHCI) between 1975 and 2007.The three stages of evolutionary process of ecological economics discipline from its institutional formation,expansion to thorough development were summarized,the contribution of pivotal points,which stand for the famous ecological economists and their work,to the development of ecological economics were analyzed.The research frontier topics in different stages related to ecological economics can be reflected by the special terms which were detected by information visualization tool CiteSpace.