The purpose of this study is to explore the characteristics of photocatalysis literature based on the theoretical perspectives of the bibliometrics, such as literature growth, document type and language, author affiliation productivity and journal productivity. The distribution of journal articles and core journals were examined by Bradford's law, Bradford-Zipf's law and the impact factor of ISI's Journal Citation Reports (JCR). A total of 7141 bibliographic records, from 1970 to 2003, were retrieved from Science Citation Index Expended (SCIE) database. The results of this study reveal that 1. the literature growth rate is in a steadily up-growing trend recently. Moreover, the overall growth is similar to exponential model; 2. research article is the major type of publication. Research and review papers account for 92.5% of total literature; 3. English is the most frequently used language and Japan is the most productive country; 4. zone analysis and graphical formulation from Bradford's law of scattering are reexamined and it is found to be inapplicable to journal productivity distribution; 5. the Bradford's law and Bradford-Zipf's law are applied and identified 13 and 15 core journals, respectively; 6. based upon the impact factor from JCR, the average impact factor for journals of the first zone and second zone is higher than journals of the other zones.