The pesticide application is intensifying in order to promote crop yields for sustaining the increasing population, as consequence, more and more pesticide residues were left or entered into environmental media such as soil. The paper used CiteSpace5.6.R4 visualization software to analyze samples obtained from WOS database in order to grasp the development history and relationship of soil pesticide pollution field, and defined the focus and frontier direction of this research field. There results showed that:1) The research could be divided into the steady and the surge stages, the steady stage had the broad perspective and content which provided the guidance for subsequent in-depth research, while the surge stage had diverse hotspots and long duration of research heat. 2) China, the United States and France were the main contributing countries, but international research institutions did not work closely together. 3) The research in this field was valued by international high-level journals and was worthy of further investigation. 4) Research hotspots mainly focued on pollution types, degradation mechanisms and risk assessment. 5) The research frontiers in this field were the analysis of pollution sources, the spatial distribution of pollution, the restoration mechanism, and risk assessment focusing on the organic pollution left over from the production and application of pesticides.