Jiangxi is rich in red cultural resources, and the integration of red stories into the ideological and political education of university courses is an important topic worth exploring in the curriculum design of all university teachers. In this paper, we selected 1596 pieces of literature on the research of integrating red culture into college students’ civic education, included in Chinese and foreign language databases between 2004 and 2023, and used CiteSpace software to visualize and analyze the annual number of publications, authors, keywords and other aspects of the literature. Co-occurrence relationship analysis, cluster analysis, and emergence analysis of high-frequency keywords were conducted through bibliometrics to study the cutting-edge trends and hotspots of research in this field. The study shows that the current research on the integration of red culture into the current situation of college students’ ideological education is in a period of rapid development, and the research trends and hotspots in this field mainly focus on “red resources” and “curriculum ideology”, with the emergence intensities of 8.925 and 5.934 respectively. This study comprehensively grasps the research hotspots and development frontier trends in this field, provides a reference basis for the choice of research direction in this field, and provides ideas for promoting in-depth ideological and political education in Jiangxi universities.