Exploring the Worldwide Publishing, Research Progress and Hotspots on Soil Carbon Stocks from 2015 to 2024

Soil is the second largest reservoir of carbon on Earth and soil carbon stocks is vital for carbon sequestration to mitigate the global climate change. This research aimed to systematically explore the publishing, research progress and hotspots of soil carbon stock during the past ten years. The Web of Science dataset with 23,933 records and VOSviewer software were employed to analyze the research status and focus. The results included yearly output, geographical distribution. Then they were conducted by cited sources co-citation, cited references co-citation, author keywords co-occurrence analysis to reveal the interrelationship among these articles. A total of six clusters were identified, which included: (1) carbon sequestration; (2) climate change; (3) carbon storage; (4) land use; (5) soil minerals and organic matter; (6) greenhouse gas and permafrost. The three future research direction were proposed, which comprised: (1) microbial community and carbon cycling; (2) climate change mitigation; (3) the digital technology and machine learning.