Graphene is a rising star as one of the promising materials with many applications. Its global literature increased fast in recent years. In this work, bibliometric analysis and knowledge visualization technology were applied to evaluate global scientific production and developing trend of graphene research. The data were collected from 1991 to 2010 from the Science Citation Index database, Conference Proceeding Citation Index database and Derwent Innovation Index database integrated by Thomson Reuters. The published papers from different subjects, journals, authors, countries and keywords distributed in several aspects of research topics proved that graphene research increased rapidly over past 20 years and boosted in recent 5 years. The distinctions in knowledge map show that the clusters distributed regularly in keywords of applied patents in recent 5 years due to the potential applications of graphene research gradually found. The analytical results provided several key findings of bibliometrics trend.
