The comprehensive evaluation and improvement of soil quality are closely linked with food security and human health. As an important component of the development strategy of soil science during the 14th Five-Year Plan, the subdiscipline about the soil quality and food security is making contribution to govern and improve the quality of cultivated soil, which will cope with the food security crisis. The results of bibliometric analysis show that although China has started late in the research of this subdiscipline compared with the developed countries, it is accelerating upward and even has the tendency to surpass all of the other countries in recent years. With the erupting of the climate and environmental pollution issues, the international research hotpots of this subdiscipline are mainly focused on the environmental monitoring, soil utilization, fertilization management, remediation of pollution (heavy metal(loid), antibiotic, organic pesticide, and pathogenic microorganism) and sustainable development. Meanwhile, this subdiscipline takes the soil quality, soil pollution, and food security as the key research directions. Combined with the fields of geomatics, environmental science, applied mathematics, and medicine to form new prior interdisciplines, this subdiscipline can utilize their advanced theories and techniques of isotope tracer, biogeochemical cycling, molecular biology, and health risk model to solve some key scientific problems in the soil quality monitoring under regional scale, quality management of soil nutrients, human health risk assessment, migration and transformation of pollutants in soil-crop systems, and immobilization and remediation of soil pollution in the future.