Abstract: To establish a scientific foundation for further studies and to better understand special soil subgrade research foci and development directions, a visualization analysis of 2601 and 2102 article from 2005 to 2019 was conducted based on the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and Web of Science (WOS) core databases. Time distribution feature, country/region distribution, organization distribution, main source journal distribution, research hotspots and frontier of literature are all analyzed, and the knowledge domain maps are plotted with CiteSpace visualization software. It was found that from 2005 to 2019, the analysis uncovered that China, USA, Australia, Iran and India as the top five most productive countries publishing about subgrade stability and reinforcement with special soil, but results from the USA are the most influential ones in this field, the national/regional quantitative analysis showed that the density of international co-occurrence network is higher than that of China, which indicated that the international research on the subgrade stability and reinforcement with special soil is relatively concentrated, and the CNKI research was focused on dynamic compaction methods, adding CFG pile and geogrid to strengthen the soil subgrade and the WOS researches were focused on the use of geosynthetics to strengthen the subgrade. The current researches of CNKI were revealed to be the compression and deformation characteristics of lightweight foam soil fill subgrade whereas soft soil subgrade problems and numerical analysis methods were the current research foci in the WOS.