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Extreme climatic events have increased in frequency globally, with a simultaneous surge in scientific interest about their ecological consequences, particularly in sensitive freshwater, coastal, and marine ecosystems. In this context, it is imperative that ecologists apply their expertise to understand and predict the ecological impacts of extreme events, and to collaborate across disciplines and sectors to improve socio-ecological resilience to extreme events. However, ecological research on extreme events is often opportunistic and hampered by lack of coordination, among ecologists and among interdisciplinary collaborators. We conducted a literature search to investigate the research approaches that ecologists use to study extreme events in aquatic ecosystems (including freshwater, coastal, and marine ecosystems), that is, to understand how, when, and where ecologists study these events, and to identify areas to improve research practices. We used keywords related to ecology, aquatic ecosystems, and types of extreme events to identify 215 relevant papers in the literature and we examined these papers to identify 49 studies that met our inclusion criteria of including observations of ecological responses to an extreme event occurring in an aquatic ecosystem. We then extracted information from the 49 included papers, including information on the ecosystem, the extreme event, the spatial and temporal approaches to sampling, the types of response variables sampled, and the magnitude of responses measured. This dataset collates research approaches to the study of extreme events in aquatic ecosystems at a broad scale. Based on this literature review, we identified key areas where aquatic ecologists can improve research practices, including prioritizing pre- and post-event data collection, leveraging long-term and cross-site monitoring networks, and adopting novel approaches to analysis, synthesis, and collaboration.