To discuss the research situation, hot spots and future trends in diabetes nursing nationally and internationally over the last decade based on bibliometrics.

Research papers on diabetes care, included in China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and Web of Science (WOS), were retrieved from 2013 to 2022. CiteSpace 6.1.R6 was used to analyze the distribution of publishing institutions, high-frequency keywords, keyword clustering, keyword time zone graph and emergent words. VOSviewer was used to analyze the network of authors.

A total of 2 979 articles were included. Of these, 2 155 were in English and 824 were in Chinese. The annual publication volume of diabetes care was stable both nationally and internationally, and the number of publications in the top 10 journals accounted for 29.71% (885/2 979) of the total. There were a number of high-yield authors (more than 10 articles) who continued to devote themselves to diabetes care research at home and abroad. The most frequent keywords at home and abroad were “diabetic foot”, “health education”, “self-management” or “management”, “glycemic control”, “self-management”. In the last 3 years (from 2020 to 2022), the keywords with the longest emergence time and the highest emergence intensity were “validity (3.54)” and “reliability (2.64)” of CNKI and “weight (3.52)” and “clinical trial (3.36)” of WOS.

Diabetes nursing research is progressing at a steady rate. Over the past decade, research has focused on topics related to diabetes self-management, glycemic control, quality of life, and diabetic foot. Among these, diabetes-related scales, weight management, and clinical trials have received considerable attention in the last three years.

Diabetes mellitus; Nursing; Bibliometrics; CiteSpace; VOSviewer; Visual analysis