Abstract:Collecting empirical research literature of green technology innovation based on patents from Web of Science, the time as of December 31, 2016. Firstly, trend of existing literature, countries which authors belonging to and studied, journal quality and main research area and network of cited and citing relationship are analyzed. Secondly, literature are classified according to the two dimensional framework named research topic-research level, main measures of green technology innovation are summarized, besides, the literature are systematically reviewed based on the classification results. The results show that research on green technology innovation has attracted the attention of scholars who are mainly from the United States, China, Germany, Italy, these literature have high quality and a close citation relationship, and more attention are focused on the area of environment, energy and economic. Three common methods for mining green patents in patent databases are referred and choosing right measure is a key factor to improve the quality of research. And future research may emphasized on the evolution of green technology innovation and its transfer, designing government subsidy mechanism and identifying internal heterogeneity, and evaluating the economic benefit of green technology innovation.