In recent years, ideological and political education based on curriculum (IPEC) has been highly valued by universities and has become a research hotspot in the field of professional talent cultivation and ideological and political education. Research literature on the IPEC in universities has shown a rapid growth trend. Therefore, a systematic summary and review of the current situation of IPEC in higher education is conducive to better carrying out relevant research and practical work in the future. Based on the 1860 high-quality literatures on IPEC in higher education published in the Chinese core journal database and CSSCI database from 2017 to 2022 as the research samples, this paper provides a systematic review of the current research status about the IPEC in higher education by using the bibliometric method and visual literature analysis software CiteSpace. It analyzes the research trends of the IPEC in higher education from the perspectives of research literature, research institutions, and research authors. And it summarizes the hot topics of IPEC in higher education through the clustering analysis of keyword co-occurrence networks, secondary reading and systematic sorting of representative literature. In addition, it identifies the evolution of the research about IPEC in higher education by analyzing the timeline graph of keywords. The results show that current research on the IPEC in higher education is highly concerned and widely participated by college teachers and educators; hot topics of the research about IPEC in higher education mainly involve six aspects: essential connotation, construction practice, element integration, teaching design, teaching ability and effect evaluation; the evolution of related research can be divided into three stages: budding exploration (2017-2018), rapid development (2019-2020) and steady development (2021-2022). Finally, based on the current research progress and reform trends of the IPEC, and in combination with the policy trends of the education regulatory department the research trends of IPEC in higher education are prospected.