Objectives Nutrient cycling plays an essential role in soil fertility and plant growth, which is mainly driven by soil microorganisms. Exploiting the potentiality of microbe in regulating nutrient turnover in soil–plant systems has become an important tendency to increase nutrient use efficiency. Reviewing the historical advance in researches on nutrient cycling and soil microbial community, and figuring out our advantages and disadvantages in these fields on the world will be great helpful to find the key research fields and further promote the domestic research level.

Methods In this study, bibliometrics and big data visualisation were used to quantitatively analyze the historical advances achieved in nutrient cycling and microbial community researches in the past 60 years. The similarities and differences in different periods were compared between domestic and international researches.

Main advances The domestic studies could be classified into starting (1981–1990), developing (1991–2005) and maturing stages (2006–2016). At starting stage, the " hot spots” were scattered and researchers mainly focused on the fertility related function of specific microorganisms and enzyme activities in red soil, paddy soil and purple soil. During the developing stage, researchers were mainly focused on microbial biomass and enzyme activities that related to soil fertility and environmental functions, and the connecting among the research works was strengthened. After entering the maturing stage, the connections among research hot spots were more developed, and the interaction of microbial community structure and soil nutrient cycling became the dominant hot spots. Since the 1990s, the domestic researchers have followed the cutting-edge international research. This process could be categorized into initial (1990–2005) and rapid catch-up stages (2006–2016). During initial catch-up stage, domestic scholars followed the international trends and studied the interaction between microbial community and carbon and nitrogen cycling. However, the domestic networks were still immature, lacking of rhizosphere studies and merely concentrated on red soil. When coming to rapid catch-up stage, domestic scholars strengthened the studies on microbial mechanisms of nutrient dynamics in paddy soil and rhizosphere. In addition, the rising of research on soil microbial network structure and function conducted by domestic academia appeared at the same time as that by the international academia. However, the new findings on soil microbial network structure and functions need more solid proofs. Over all, domestic studies developed dramatically fast, although relatively later than international ones. Within the past 20 years, more and more researches have transferred from simply enzyme activities to the interaction of microbial co-occurring network and soil function. The domestic network are maturing, and showing the convergent tendency with international network. However, the studies are relatively weak on the driving mechanism of microbial community evolution applied to nutrient cycling.

Conclusions and Prospectives In the future studies, efforts should be put on developing appropriate regional practices that are suitable for microbial regulation to improve nutrient use efficiency, and on developing the fundamental theories of the synergetic changes in microbial community structure and function as well.