The application of machine learning (ML) techniques in various fields of science has increased rapidly, especially in the last 10 years. The increasing availability of soil data that can be efficiently acquired remotely and proximally, and freely available open-source algorithms, have led to an accelerated adoption of ML techniques to analyse soil data. Given the large number of publications, it is an impossible task to manually review all papers on the application of ML in soil science without narrowing down a narrative of ML application in a specific research question. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of the application of ML techniques in soil science aided by a ML algorithm (latent Dirichlet allocation) to find patterns in a large collection of text corpora. The objective is to gain insight into publications of ML applications in soil science and to discuss the research gaps in this topic.