Abstract: In the last few years, considerable literature relating to soil quality has grown up. There has been a great change in the research field of soil quality as the global climate change and environment pollution problems are getting worse. Confronting a massive amount of research literature, the use of traditional methods for reviewing publications has a certain limitation. Therefore, it is necessary to take the advantage of scientific metrology and information technology to quantify and qualify the research literature in this field. Using Citespace V software for visualizing patterns and trends in scientific literature, we analyzed classical literature which focused on this field, documented the association of co-citation literature with keyword co-appearance network. According to clustering analysis and the burst detection, we found that the focuses of global soil quality research changed from the response of soil organic carbon and its fractions to management practices, the sensitivity of microbial indicators, and definition of soil quality to methods, indicators and framework of soil quality assessment. Compared to theoretical research, the application soil quality research in practice such as agricultural production and environmental monitoring was gradually strengthened. Currently, the soil quality monitoring and its response to global climate change and soil amendment have attracted a large number of attentions. The proportion of environment rather than agriculture application has been progressively increased. In the near future, soil quality research will show following trends: 1) Developing countries will play an important role in this field due to their increasing needs for food safety and environmental protection. 2) The response of soil quality to global climate change and soil restoration will be the research priority. 3) Sustainable development is still the topic in this research field. We suggested that soil quality assessment, monitoring and restoration should be implemented based on the features of the countries and regions. Laws and regulations should be made to guarantee the normalization and sustainability of soil management. Visualization of research literature enables us to observe and understand the state of the research field more intuitively and explore the hidden rules and patterns, which can be a useful supplementary to traditional literature reviews.

Key words: Citespace, map of scientific knowledge, research hotspot, research trend, soil quality