Objective  With the increasing of atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition, the effects of N deposition on ecosystems have been drawn great attention of researchers. Nitrogen deposition changes the characteristics of soil N pool, and also affects the function and structure characteristics of soil microorganisms. In this paper, the bibliometrics was used to explore the distribution characteristics of international studies on the effects of N deposition on soil microorganisms in the past 20 years and the trends of research frontiers and hot spots. The aims were to clarify the development trend and research hotspots of this research field, and provide certain guidance for future research.

  Method  The Citespace software was used to conduct a bibliometric review of the research between N deposition and soil microorganisms published from 2001 to 2020 and extracted from the Web of Science. The distribution characteristics of the state, academic institutions, author, journal, cite-reference, category and keywords of these literature data were analyzed.

  Result  The results showed that the United States has been a major contributor to this field and published the most number of papers in this field, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences was the academic institution with the most number of publications. In addition, the research fields on the effects of atmospheric N deposition on microorganisms were mainly focused in the environmental science, ecology and agriculture. Overall, the research between the atmospheric N deposition and soil microorganism has changed from single discipline to a multidisciplinary in different fields.

  Conclusion  The current researches on the effects of atmospheric N deposition on soil microorganisms tend to explore the coupling mechanism between soil microorganisms and soil nutrient cycling and the response mechanism of soil microorganisms to atmospheric N deposition.