Abstract:It is one of the important contents of deepening the rural reform to improve the compensation mechanism for cultivated land and basic farmland protection. This paper, based on the relevant papers published on the compensation for cultivated land protection in CNKI database from 1985 to 2016, used the methods of documentation, network retrieval and comparison to summarize the basic features, main contents, characteristics and trends on Chinese cultivated land protection and compensation mechanism in order to promote further the systematic and in-depth research. The results showed that the quantity of literature showed an increasing trend, and the core author group had initially formed, but the number of core journals was still few, and academic level needed to be further promoted. The research on compensation for cultivated land protection was still in the stage of theory analysis and method of study. The qualitative research-based method was still mainly used while the quantitative method is insufficient, and the perfect theoretical system of research was still in the forming process. The spatial distribution of empirical study, the research scale and regional distribution were uneven and discordant. No consensus was reached in the research method and model establishment on compensation standard. For the direction and contents in the further research, more attentions were needed on the theory applicability of the different methods in different units as well as on the practicability and verification of study results.