Bibliometric methods is a common research tool for systematic analysis in various fields. An effective bibliometric analysis based on the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-E) published by Thomson Reuters was carried out to provide insights into research activities on arctic benthos from 1991 to 2012. Analyzed aspects included document type, language, and publication output as well as distribution of journals, subject category, countries and institutes. Results showed that 1) Number of papers, author number per article and cited reference count per article on arctic benthos increased year by year. 2) Papers on arctic benthos were published by authors from 58 countries or territories. In the top most productive 20 countries, there were eight member states of the Arctic Council (Russia, Canada, the United States of America (USA), Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden and Finland), as well as nine observer states of the Arctic Council (France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK), China, Japan and Italy). In the top most productive 20 countries, USA, Germany, Canada, Norway, Russia, UK and Denmark took the top seven positions on many indicators, such as, total article output, single-country independent articles, international collaborative articles, first author publications and corresponding author publications. USA, Norway, Canada and Denmark are the most important international collaborative research nations in the field of arctic research. The USA always took a significantly leading position. 3) There were 1364 institutes contributing to 2127 articles. Out of the 1364 institutes, 1212 institutes produced only 1-5 articles. USA had the 6 most productive institutes on the list of the top 20 most productive institutes. Germany, Canada and Norway each had 3 most productive institutes on the list. Russia and Denmark had 2 and Poland had one. The Russian Academy of Sciences took the first position according to total number of articles (9.4%). However, average citations per item was near the bottom on the list (18^th), and the h-index ranked 10^th. Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (Germany) and Kiel University (Germany) ranked the highest in the h-index. 4) The top four subjects with the most papers on arctic benthos are marine and freshwater biology, environmental ecology, oceanography, and geology respectively. According to the number of published articles, Polar Biology ranked the first with 165 published articles, followed by Marine Ecology Progress Series (138) which ranked the first based on an h-index of 34. The status of current research related to arctic benthos in China was briefly discussed. The purpose of this study is to quantitatively analyze the literature on arctic benthos and weigh the influence of different countries in arctic studies. It can hopefully facilitate future research on arctic benthos for Chinese scholars.