Abstract: To explore the role of scientific and technological innovation in China’s coal industry in promoting coal mine safety, the data of three indicators, namely, the number of papers published in the field of coal mine safety, the number of science and technology awards and awards in the coal industry, and the number of patents authorized in the coal industry, were sorted out from 2002 to 2020. The correlation between the three indexes and coal mine safety is calculated by statistical analysis method, and the results are all strongly negative correlation, which indicates that with the development of scientific and technological innovation in the coal industry, China’s coal mine safety level is constantly improving. At the same time, the development of coal mine safety in China over the past 40 years has been sorted out. 7　428 relevant literatures from 1980 to 2020 on CNKI.com have been taken as analysis samples. The results show that the institutions with more research in this field are China Coal Technology and Engineering Group Chongqing Research Institute and Shenyang Research Institute; in the research hotspot of coal mine safety, the mechanism research, monitoring, control and evaluation of gas accidents are the key research directions; in the evolution of coal mine safety frontier, it can be divided into three stages. However, the keywords, such as coal mine informatization, Internet of things, perception, cloud computing and intelligence run through the whole process, showing a new form due to the passage of time. This shows that, based on the development of coal mine information technology, it will lead the development direction of coal industry in a deeper level in the future.