The integration of environmental sustainability research into engineering education has garnered increasing attention from policymakers. Understanding the research frontiers in sustainability education is pivotal in guiding ‘responsible science and engineering education’. This study focuses on two esteemed education journals, Environmental Education Research and the Journal of Environmental Education, along with the International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, for analysis. Leveraging the bibliometric visualization software CiteSpace, we examine and compare literature data within the WOS core collection of these three journals from 2010 to 2021. Our analysis reveals a slight discrepancy in network density among the journals during the retrieval period, with respective values of 0.0082, 0.0076, and 0.0118. However, the examination of keyword co-occurrence frequency highlights inconsistencies in the predominant keywords across the three journals, suggesting divergent areas of focus.