ObjectiveThe increasing emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) poses a great threat to global public health. Soil as an important repository and medium for ARGs has attracted extensive attention from many scholars.MethodIn order to have a comprehensive understanding of the research progress and hotspots in the field of soil ARGs, the VOSviewer and CiteSpace software were used to perform a bibliometric analysis of the publications related to soil ARGs published from 2013 to 2022 in "Web of Science" database. More specifically, density visualization analysis, keyword emergence analysis, and contribution network analysis were performed to deeply discuss the types of publications, cited times, country/region and institution of publications, keywords, research directions, and the hotspots and trends of research.ResultOur results demonstrated that the number and cited times of the publications related to soil ARGs increased year by year. The number of publications increased slowly in the first five years (2013—2017), while it rapidly increased in the last five years (2018—2022). Besides, the maximum cited times was 22123 times. China published the most publications in the field of soil ARGs, accounting for 61.40% of the total number of publications, and China cooperated closely with 27 countries, including Australia and the United States. Tetracycline and sulfadiazine were the two main types of antibiotics in the soil ARGs field, and Escherichia coli as model bacterium was a microbial type of great interest in this field. The results of citation burst and co-occurrence analysis indicated that research hotspots of soil ARGs differed significantly in different periods. At first, scholars focused on the understanding and quantification of ARGs. Subsequently, more attention was paid to the source analysis of ARGs and their intrinsic connection with microorganisms. The study of the spread and fate of ARGs has become a hot topic of interest and research for scientists today.ConclusionThis study conducted a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the relevant publications in the field of soil ARGs. On the whole, the research on the propagation deterrence and reduction techniques of soil ARGs is still insufficient. Future research may focus on the development and improvement of monitoring system as well as mathematical model establishment to assess the environmental risks of soil ARGs and their effects on human health. Besides, prevention-oriented source control of soil ARGs should be expanded. In addition, the diffusion mechanisms and influencing factors should be explored further to lay a solid foundation for ARGs reduction technology.