The change in soil organic carbon (SOC) stability may break the balance of the carbon budget in soil and then lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. In this paper, based on the Web of Science Core Collection database and by using bibliometric methods, 2 144 papers related to the stability of SOC from 1991 to 2022 were quantitatively analyzed. The countries, institutions, and themes were classified and visualized according to the number of articles, total citation frequency, and relevance. The results show that the number of research papers on SOC stability is rising. China has the highest number of articles (793 in total) but with relative low influence, thus need to strengthen the scientific research and innovation capacity; US has highest intermediate centrality (0.38) and the largest international impact. So far, the research on the stability of SOC mainly focuses on the effects of land use change, environmental effects, and farming systems on the components, mineralization rate, turnover, distribution characteristics, and stability of organic carbon. Future research should pay attention to the comprehensive study of SOC stability from various aspects, clarify the relationship between the mechanisms of organic carbon stability and build the models, explore the stability of organic carbon in different ecosystems and the contribution of carbon sequestration, and promote the attention to topics such as mineral carbon stability, soil erosion, omics, microbial carbon pump, and wetland.