Ecosystem services are the conditions and processes provided by natural ecosystems and their species that supply and sustain human existence, and are products or services that human received directly or indirectly through the functions of ecosystems. It has typically regional characteristics. The Loess Plateau is an important ecological security barrier in the Yellow River Basin, with a large scale and long duration of ecological construction, and is an important case area for ecosystem service research in China. Previous studies have estimated the value and quality of ecosystem services, identified their trade-offs and synergies, and evaluated their supply-demand relationship on the Loess Plateau. However, there is a lack of generalization and comparison among different conclusions. We analysed the main findings of the literature on ecosystem services on the Loess Plateau region over the past 20 years, and got the following results. The number of relevant papers in both English and Chinese have been generally increasing, as well as the frequency of citations. The research content was mainly concerned with the quantitative estimation of ecosystem services on the Loess Plateau, and it has gradually expanded to the analysis of ecosystem service trade-offs and the assessment of supply-demand relationship in recent years. Since the Grain-for-Green project, the vegetation cover of the Loess Plateau has increased and the total amount of ecosystem services has been on the rise, presenting a spatial pattern of more increased in the southeast and less increased in the northwest. There are clear trade-offs between provision and regulation services on the Loess Plateau, and the intensity varies apparently at different scales. Both the supply and demand of ecosystem services are increasing in the region, with clear spatial and temporal differences in their matching degree. To address the limitations of insufficient types of quality assessments, high uncertainty in value estimation, lack of attribution of trade-offs and synergies, and insufficient representation of spatial delivery, future research on ecosystem services on the Loess Plateau needs to strengthen the estimation of ecosystem service values towards the realization of ecological product value, improve the assessment of ecosystem service supply and demand from the perspective of spatial delivery, and enhance the simulation of ecosystem service trade-off scenarios to support territorial space optimization.