Under the background of ecological civilization, soil erosion and conservation face new opportunities and challenges nowadays. We employed a bibliometric analysis on the research of soil erosion and conservation in the past ten years. The results summarized the research tendency and hotspots, and presented China's main achievements and international status in this field. Considering social needs, we pointed out the main existing problems for scientific researches on soil erosion and conservation. Then, we identified the front scientific issues, including the coupling mechanisms of hydrology and soil erosion, the soil erosion process and modeling, the soil erosion evolution and its catastrophic mechanism under global change, the mutual feedback between socio-economy and soil erosion, the soil conservation for ecological function improvement, and the new technologies and methods for soil erosion research.