Taking 218 core documents on the coordinated development of water use and industrial structure of CNKI from 1992 to 2021 as the data base, with the help of CiteSpace software, authors, institutions and keywords are visually mapped separately to systematically sort out research hotspots and reveal research progress in the field. It is found that the fluctuating trend of the number of articles published in this field is in line with the trend of water policy promulgation. The tightness of cooperation between research institutions in the field is less than the tightness of cooperation between authors. Key words such as “decoupling”, “environmental regulation" and "coordination" have appeared frequently in the mapping of research paths, constituting a hot topic of research at the forefront of the field recently.