Ecosystem services and human well-being have received increasing scientific interest owing to their importance in influencing sustainability. Yet, quantitative and visual analyses of the scientific literature on ecosystem services and human well-being remain scarce. Here, we explored the scientific literature on ecosystem services and human well-being at a global scale to investigate the temporal development, scientific collaboration, research hotspots, and emerging trends over the last 27 years (1992–2018) using CiteSpace. The number of publications has substantially increased since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA). The majority of publications (79.86%) were occurred during the period of 2013–2018, with Ecosystem Services being the dominant journal and most research originating from the USA, England, and Australia. And the Chinese Academy of Sciences was the most productive institution. The top-ranking category was environmental sciences. Much more work is needed to strengthen the cohesion among environmental, economic, and social science in this field. Three key research themes prevailed: biodiversity, conservation, and management. The hotspots of early studies focused on the descriptive and quantitative analysis of ecosystem services, including “contingent value”, “model” and “dynamics”. The emerging active topics were“poverty alleviation”, “cultural ecosystem service”, “perception” and“green infrastructure”. Integrative research on socio-cultural and biophysical dimensions is expected to be used to increase support policymaking in the future. The assessment of subjective well-being, the relations between supply-demand and human well-being, and sustainable management represent challenging areas for future research on ecosystem services and human well-being.
