【Objective】Soil microbes are an indispensable active component of soil ecosystems. The research on soil microbes is closely linked to current international hotspot issues such as global change, agricultural production, soil environmental protection, etc. The research in soil microbiology is very fruitful, and of great significance for quantitative analysis of soil microbiology literature and data. The use of traditional literature analysis methods to handle large volumes of relevant literature and information and to track development of the research fields has come across a number of difficulties. This paper was oriented to find out latest research hotspots and development trends in the field of soil microorganisms at home and abroad.【Method】Bibliometric analysis of the soil microbial literature contained in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDE) database of 1990-2018 in the Web of Science was carried out by country, research institute, source journal, citation, main research content and hot spot of attention, with the aid of visual analysis software, like VOSviewer and CiteSpace. A diagram of cooperations between countries or between research institutions was drawn with the aid of VOSviewer, and keyword co-occurrence network atlases by time period and by country were with CiteSpace. 【Result】Results show that in this research field, the number of documents in China is growing rapidly, but the total citation is still low; the USA ranks first in number of documents and total citation frequency. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, an important research institution in China, its on the top of the lists of number of documents and total citation frequency in the country, but is still quite low in per-paper citation frequency. The "Applied and Environmental Microbiology", "Soil Biology & Biochemistry" are the main journal sources. Though the journal “Soil Science Society of America Journal” is quite low in influence and in volume of publications, it is high or in the forefront in total citation frequency. The keyword co-occurrence network in China formed quite late, but it develops rapidly, showing a trend of convergence with foreign researches in hotspot. The study object has evolved from a single species to a complex microflora, and the research direction has turned more attention to microbial community composition and diversity. Keywords in the soil microbiology research papers in China are increasing in number and in linkage, forming cross-cutting research hotspots. Soil microbiology researches both at home and abroad focus mainly on the following aspects: soil microbes participating in soil organic matter decomposition, carbon and nitrogen recycling as nutrient; biodegradation of heavy metal or organic pollutants matter and bioremediation of heavy metal or organic compound polluted soils; mechanisms of soil microbial communities responding to global environmental change in structure; and mechanisms of rhizosphere microbes, soil and plants interacting with each other. 【Conclusion】Researchers all over the world in this field have made great progresses in the field of soil microbial community structure, function and diversity. Through co-occurrence analysis of keywords by time periods in China and abroad, this paper has brought to light hotspots and trend of the research on soil microbiology, which may be of some reference value for understanding the context of the overall researches in the field of soil microbe and provide certain theoretical guidance to researchers who have just begun their exploration in the field.