Into the 21st century, the research on ionic liquids had developed from water-resistant system to functionalized system, and a large number of high-level research outputs have emerged. During the last decade, from 2009 to 2018, 20 research articles on ionic liquids had been published in top journals such as Nature and Science. It can be expected that the future prospects of ionic liquid related research will be tremendous and there will be even more to be explored. Based on the bibliometric analysis and visualization tools, taking SCIE database as the data source to analyze the developing trends of ionic liquids research field from the perspectives of publication time distribution, region distribution, international cooperation, journal and subject category distribution, high-yield institutions distribution, high-yield authors and research topics. The results showed that the field of ionic liquids had maintained an active research and development trend in the past decade, with the amount of publications increasing year by year. A total of 114 countries or regions and more than 9000 institutions had participated in the research of ionic liquids, and the major productive countries of the United States and China were at the center of the cooperation network. China ranked first in the world in terms of the amount of publications and total citations. At the same time, it was found that the research focused in the field of ionic liquids in recent ten years was concentrated on high pressure battery, electrolyte, catalytic reaction, kinetics research, interface research, CO2 chemistry, separation and enhancement technology and catalytic degradation. From the perspective of the evolution trend of the research topics, the research of ionic liquid in catalyst and CO2 adsorption and CO2 capture was gradually declining, and new materials of electrochemical energy storage, biological catalytic degradation and metal-organic framework were likely to become new research hotspots in the coming years. The results of this research were useful for researchers to better grasp the development context of the field, and provide references for scientific research and discipline development.