Background Management of patients with diabetic foot ulcer is often burdensome, complex, and arduous. In addition, it can be challenging for clinicians and researchers to understand the surgical management of diabetic foot ulcer from the existing studies because of the extensive literature on this topic.Methods Bibliometric analysis was conducted using CiteSpace, and data were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection. Results A total of 1,475 publications were retrieved. The “United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS, USA)” and “National Institutes of Health (NIH, USA)” were the most important funders. The most active authors were Armstrong DG and Lipsky BA. The most active institutions were the University of Washington and University of Arizona. Developed countries in the USA and England contributed the most to the literature, and the publications were clustered into 15 topics. The emerging topic trend was the cluster label for “diabetic foot osteomyelitis” and “multidisciplinary setting”. Conclusions This study provides researchers and clinicians with important information on the cooperation of authors, institutions, and countries, intellectual structure, knowledge flow, and emerging topic trend, to help them with their subject cognition, study visits, study abroad, research direction selection, and grant applications.