The purpose of this study was to investigate the characteristics of research related to palliative care from 1952 to 2009 within the science citation index expanded (SCIE) and the social science citation index (SSCI) databases. This study showed how the growth of research related to palliative care is a well known phenomenon, that statistics of the Bradford’s Law identified five core journals related to palliative care. We also applied Growing Hierarchical Self-Organizing Map (GHSOM), a text-mining Neural Networks tool, to obtain a hierarchical topic map. The topic map illustrated the delicate intertwining of subject areas and provided a more explicit illustration of the concepts within each subject area. Furthermore, the result of the topic map may indicate that the subject area of health care science and service played an importance role in multidiscipline within the research related to palliative care.