Wastewater is produced through the use of clean water and impacts environmental quality; therefore, it must be treated to reduce negative impacts. Adsorption technology is a form of wastewater treatment used to address these problems. The adsorption process can be applied using various materials including graphene-based, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), carbon nanotubes (CNTs), and carbon-based activated carbon. This journal review aims to determine the applications and development for adsorption technology in wastewater treatment. This review used several software programs including Microsoft Excel to process the data, and VOSviewer to analyze the bibliographic mapping. As a result, 766 articles on adsorption treatment with an adsorbent for wastewater were extracted from the Scopus database and analyzed. The study found that the trend of this topic is increasing each year. Many kinds of adsorbents, such as activated carbon, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), and graphene-based materials can be used to treat large volumes of wastewater, such as tea waste, dyes, or soybean waste. Moreover, this review showed that many researchers used activated carbon as an adsorbent. In addition, the key contributions of this study are the analysis of relationships between authors, keywords, and journal publishers who discuss this adsorption process and the types of adsorbents used. This can be used as a reference for future studies.