An effective bibliometric analysis based on Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) published by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) was carried out to identify the long-term care research between 1991 and 2008. The objective was to conduct a quantitative and qualitative analysis for global trends of long-term care related research. The characteristics related to publications were analyzed. Apparently more and more authors, institutes, and countries engaged in the research over the 18 years. The USA produced the most single country articles and international collaborative articles, followed by Canada and UK. Synthetically analyzing the distribution of paper title, author keyword and keyword plus, it could be concluded that application of long-term care mainly focused on five branches. There are gerontology, psychiatry, health care science, nursing and epidemiology.