Ecosystems services, defined as the benefits that humans derive from the ecosystem, have attracted more attention because increasing human population, economic growth and global consumption pattern have placed an enormous pressure on environmental systems in recent years. Ecosystem services research is a frontier research field bridging ecology, economy and social sciences. Here, we reviewed the ecosystem services and examined the different perspectives on the ecosystem services research, by searching for publications appearing on the ISI Web of Knowledge up to 2012 with the key term ‘ecosystem services’. We found 993 studies in the past years by 3134 scientists, working in 1184 research institutions in 80 countries/regions. Literature on ecosystem services was sourced from 258 journals with 55% of these being concentrated in 24 major journals, which had an average impact factor 5.976. Based on the numbers of articles, authors, institutions and countries related to ecosystem services research, we classified 1980-1997 as the enlightenment stage of ecosystem services, 1998-2004 as the exploring stage, and 2005-2012 as the comprehensive and rapid development stage. The main contributing countries were the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and China. Ecosystem services research originated in the United States, which has retained the most important position till today. Other countries joined the ecosystem services research mainly after 2005. The ecosystem services literature covered 54 subjects and different countries focused on different perspectives. The United States has maintained the leadership position, especially in the field of Business Economics. English research had strength in biodiversity conservation. The main perspectives of ecosystem services were that their evaluation method has developed to the integrated model, InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs), MIMES (Multi-scale Integrated Models of Ecosystem Services) and CICYgreen from traditional methods such as physical quality evaluation method, the market value method and emergy analysis. The internal drivers of ecosystem services included biodiversity and land use changes. Biodiversity loss altered the functioning of ecosystem and their ability to provide society with the goods and services. Land use change impacted ecosystem services provision through altering the habitats, biodiversity and ecosystem processes. The drivers outside the ecosystem included natural factors and human beings. Climate change at the global scale and meteorological disasters at the regional scale were natural factors. Urbanization, unsustainable agricultural development and water management had a negative impact on ecosystem services. However, some ecological restoration practices like Farm to Forest Program had a positive impact. Ecosystem services-based management of the ecosystem would require that the nation took account of ecosystem services as state assets, invested in them, established protected areas and pay for ecosystem services. The trade-off analysis of ecosystem services between providers and beneficiaries and between the different services were the cores of ecosystem management on a regional scale. For deeper research into ecosystem services in the future, we should strengthen the ecosystem dis-services, establish long-term monitoring of the social-ecological system for building a precise social-ecological system integration model, and improve ecosystem services-based management of the ecosystem.