Abstract: The Southern Ocean is the least disturbed area by human activities and plays an important role in the maintenance of the global ecosystem. Since the 1990s, the Southern Ocean ecological environment has been deeply studied by scholars from all over the world because of its unique natural conditions and geographics. In order to clarify the status of the Southern Ocean ecological environmental research worldwide and forecast the future research trend, the bibliometrics research method was used to count the published papers related to the Southern Ocean ecological environmental research in the Web of Science core database and a total of 7 491 valid papers were obtained. The numbers, institutions, journals, main authors and main research topics of relevant papers published from 1990 to 2020 were analyzed by the VOSviewer software, it conclusions that: (1) the numbers of Southern Ocean ecological environmental research have gradually increased in recent years. The “Kyoto Protocol” was signed in 1997 and officially entered into force in 2005, which are the time nodes when the numbers of the Southern Ocean ecological environmental research had increased significantly. (2) The United States was a leading country in the field of the Southern Ocean ecological environmental research, with three scientific research institutions that rank among the top 10 in the number of published papers. The United Kingdom and Australia were also the main countries in the field of the Southern Ocean ecological environmental research, with their major scientific research institutions ranking high in the number of papers published. China’s ecological environmental researches on the Southern Ocean started late, which was still in the catch-up stage; the gap between China, European and American countries was gradually narrowing. And (3) The main research fields of the Southern Ocean ecological environmental research in the past 30 years can be divided into ‘climate change’, ‘phytoplankton’, ‘krill’, ‘marine organism’ and ‘biogeography’. Among which, ‘climate change’ becomes a hot topic in the Southern Ocean ecological environmental research at present and will continue to be hot in the future. Distribution patterns of biodiversity and response of main ecological processes to climate change in the Southern Ocean, the developing methods to assess current and future impacts of climate change on the structure and function of Southern Ocean ecosystems will be the major research in future.