Abstract: As an important coastal space, the sandy coasts provide multiple ecosystem services. However, issues like coastal squeeze, habitat fragmentation, ecological degradation triggered by global climate change and human activities pose new challenges in protecting and managing sandy coasts. This study uses CiteSpace to visualize literature from the As an important coastal space, sandy coasts can provide multiple ecosystem services. However, problems such as coastal squeeze, habitat fragmentation and ecological degradation triggered by global climate change and human activities have posed new challenges to the protection and management of the sandy coasts. In this paper, the English literatures retrieved from the “Web of Science” core collection database are visualized by using software CiteSpace and the efforts, hotspots and trends of the research on the protection and management of sandy coasts are analyzed and reviewed. The results show that the researches on the protection and management of sandy coasts were conducted generally in the globle coastal countries from 1979 to 2024. Among them, the United States, the United Kingdom and France started earlier and held a leading advantage in this field. The number of the publications in this field shows a rapid growth and the scope of the study covers more than 60 disciplines, of which the hotspots of the research are mostly environmental science and ecology and the research themes are primarily concentrated on the geomorphological characteristics and ecological environments of the sandy coasts. By now, the sandy coast study has been gradually developed into a systematic research on coastal monitoring, shoreline evolution, protection and restoration, habitat quality, community dynamics, ecological functions, disaster warning and adaptive management. It is in the future a frontier direction of the research on the protection and management of the sandy coasts to carry out a research on the deep integration with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data and GIS.