*2.1. Searching Strategy*

We performed a combined bibliometric and content analysis of publications covering the interventions to improve QOL among people with diabetes. The Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection was selected for the retrieval of data from 1900 to 31 December, 2018. The reasons for selecting the WOS include the availability of necessary information for analyzing contents of papers such as names and addresses of authors, titles/abstracts of articles, keywords, total citations and downloads, and research area coverage, which is far more than other accessible databases. Moreover, this database has a high citation report coverage and supports various analysis measures that facilitate bibliometric analysis of the existing literature [25,26].

Articles were included if they (1) involved interventions (randomized controlled trials [RCTs], pre-post or quasi-experiments); (2) focused on people with diabetes as the targeted population; (3) had QOL or health-related QOL as primary or secondary outcomes; (4) were original articles; (5) were published in English scientific journals indexed in the WOS; and (6) had comprehensive information on the authors.

We excluded gray literature (e.g., reports, dissertations, theses, letters, news, etc.), book and book chapters, and conference abstracts/proceedings because some of these might have been published as scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals which could cause duplications. Papers without author information were also excluded because they could not be used to analyze the affiliation and collaboration networks across countries. Additionally, papers about narrative reviews/systematic reviews/meta-analysis studies were excluded because they were not original studies, which might not reflect the tendency of research development. Study protocols of interventions or papers reporting only baseline characteristics were not eligible because they did not assess the effect of specific interventions on the QOL.

To identify relevant articles, we performed the search strategy as follows:


Full records of articles were exported and downloaded independently by two members in the research team. The third researcher performed a cross-check between two datasets to ensure their consistency.
