With the increasingly drastic competitions in science and technology, patent information as the world’s largest source of technical information has become an impetus for scientific and technological innovation, as well as a powerful weapon in technological competition, attracting close attention from scholars all over the world. Related scientific literature has thus been increasing rapidly ever since. However, few scholars have conducted a comprehensive research or assessment of the intellectual bases, research hotspots and cutting-edge trends of international patent information studies. In view of this, patent information research literature, which was collected from SCI and SSCI databases of the Web of Science (WoS) between 1998 and 2018, was studied in this paper, with a focus on five subdivisions of management, economics, business, business finance, and information science library science. The knowledge units of the patent information research literature in social sciences and the relationship between them were visualized by using the bibliometric method and mapping knowledge domains with the CiteSpace software, to demonstrate the international patent information research cooperation network and the co-citation network, keyword co-occurrence network, keyword burst. The intellectual bases of international patent information research were identified through an in-depth analysis of cited documents with high co-citation; key words of high frequency and high quality was analyzed to estimate the hotspots of international patent information researches; burst keywords were studied to determine the evolvement of international patent information researches. At the same time, the paper also offered a panorama of international patent information research articles, major authors and institutions. The main findings of this paper are summarized as follows. (1) The international patent information scientific literature in the social sciences has shown a rapid growth since 2005. The results of cooperation networks show that institutions of higher learning from South Korea, Taiwan (China), and mainland China are important forces in international patent information studies.Among them, Seoul National University of Korea plays a key part in the studies on patent information. Sungjoo Lee and Yomgtea Park in Korea are highly productive authors, and Darzen Chen &Muhjuan Huang’s team in Taiwan (China) and Donghua Zhu’s team in Beijing University of Technology in mainland China are emerging research forces. (2) The intellectual bases of patent information studies include market value and patent citations, discovery and prediction of emerging technologies, emerging technologies and patent analysis methods, patent information visualization, SAO-based patent network analysis, discussions on the relation between the patent system reform and patent information, etc. B.H.Hall’s team from the University of California at Berkeley is the most outstanding contributor to the intellectual bases. (3) Research hotspots based on high-frequency keywords focus on patents, innovation, research and development, information, technology and performance and so forth. The trend based on burst keywords has evolved from patents, technologies, innovations and indicators in the early years to quality, search, mobility, knowledge flow, trend, morphological analysis and products in recent years, which shows a shift from macro-interpretation to micro-application, from information to the knowledge flow, from developed areas to developing ones. With the rapid growth and accessibility of patent application and citation data, we have every reason to believe that emerging technology prediction, technology opportunity discovery and technology trend identification will be the focal points in the studies on patent information. Our research offers the following implications and suggestions: (1) The patent affairs authority should speed up the construction of China’s patent information think tanks by focusing on the enterprise intellectual property risk prevention.(2) Enterprises should comprehensively improve the level of intellectual property protection by using mapping-knowledge-domains-based international cooperation in patent information researches as a booster. (3) The State Intellectual Property Authority should further promote the application of mapping knowledge domains with the goal of establishing a full chain incentive mechanism for innovation.