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Clarifying the concepts of self-care and self-management in type 2 diabetes: a BERTopic-based analysis of academic literature
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Giyoung Han, Youngshin Song
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Received May 18, 2026 Accepted August 25, 2026 Published online September 14, 2026
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.4040/jkan.26076
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 Abstract
- Purpose
Self-care (SC) and self-management (SM) are often used interchangeably in type 2 diabetes, although they arise from different theoretical roots. This study aimed to clarify their conceptual boundary by examining similarity and differentiation across a large body of academic literature using BERTopic-based multidimensional quantitative analysis.
Methods
A total of 13,300 abstracts on SC and SM in type 2 diabetes published from 1984 to 2025 were retrieved from PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science. Using BERTopic in Python, we derived topics and conducted time-series cosine similarity analysis, discriminative lexical analysis using term frequency–inverse document frequency, topic-purity analysis based on normalized pointwise mutual information, and log-odds ratio analysis of the largest topic.
Results
Twenty-seven topics were derived, of which 26 were interpreted. Semantic similarity converged above 0.9 after 2003; beneath this convergence, however, the concepts remained lexically differentiated. SC was aligned with everyday practice, quality of life, and psychosocial factors, including activities, adherence, quality, life, and depression, whereas SM was aligned with professional intervention and structured education, including intervention, education, outcomes, and diabetes SM education. SM-oriented topics accounted for 78.6% of the interpreted literature. This differentiation persisted within the largest topic, blood glucose monitoring, whereas “foot” was attributed to SC lexically but to SM at the topic level.
Conclusion
Although SM discourse predominated, SC retained a distinct domain, indicating its independent value in the everyday management of diabetes and the continuing importance of the nursing role in strengthening patients’ SC capacity. The two concepts appear to have a complementary relationship, and this study provides a quantitative reference for judging their use according to the level and context of care.
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