Purpose – In step with the increasing importance of patents in today’s economy, academic contributions have focused more and more on tools and practices that firms can adopt in order to fully extract patent value. This literature stream, called “strategic patent management”, has never been subject to a systematic review. Thus, in order to do so, we adopted two bibliometric techniques that allow us to identify its structure, highlighting in particular research subfields that received more attention from scholars and the ones that could benefit from a deeper investigation. Design/methodology/approach – After selecting main papers focused on “strategic patent management”, we tested whether these articles form a coherent body of literature analysing the patterns of citations among them. Then, based on the similarity of bibliographic coupling profile, papers were grouped into homogeneous factors, that we labelled “patent value”, “competitive and technological landscape” and “strategic decision”. Finally, each factor has been described and discussed. Originality/value – Re-organizing and systematizing the different contributions on the topic of “strategic patent management”, we contribute to reduce the risk of further developing a quite fragmented literature. In addition, bibliometric techniques, thanks to their quantifiability and objectivity, allow to avoid potential subjective biases Practical implications – Revising patent management practices, methods and strategies can provide useful insights to practitioners that can apply them in order to improve firm competitive advantage.