AIM: To investigate diabetic retinopathy (DR) literature using the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Science (WoS) database and to analyse the correlation results between socio-economic development datas and number of DR publications. METHODS: The statistical analysis of the documents published during 1980-2014 was analysed. The data of this study were based on the database of WoS. “Diabetic retinopathy” was used as the keywords to search the WoS database. RESULTS: The United States ranked first in the DR research with 1840 publications and 24.38% of the world production followed by England and Japan. Besides, the most productive country was Iceland. A high correlation was found between number of publications and 2014 gross domestic product (GDP) values of 81 countries (r=0.800, P<0.001). We found a significant correlation between number of publications and Human Development Index (HDI) (r=0.645, P=0.001). There is a moderate correlation between people with diabetes and number of DR publications for 81 countries (r=0.514, P<0.01). It could be analysed that estimated publication number with DR title will be 445 according to the regression curve constituted with cubic model in 2015 (R2=1.000). CONCLUSION: More DR studies have been published in developed countries, DR and other complications of diabetes have gradually increased in developing countries over recent decades. It can be expected that the number of DR studies will gradually increase in developing countries.