Objective To systematically evaluate the overall characteristics and quality of literature on economic evaluation of drugs for type 2 diabetes, and to provide recommendations for future research and related decision-making. Methods The economic evaluation literature on drugs for type 2 diabetes based on the Chinese population were searched from CNKI, Wanfang, VIP and PubMed databases. The literature that met the inclusion criteria was selected, and the key research elements were extracted. Meanwhile, the quality of health economics studies (QHES) was used to evaluate the quality of the literature. Results and Conclusion A total of 325 articles (296 in Chinese and 29 in English) were included. Most of the studies were conducted by medical institutions (247 articles, 76.0%) and they used cost-effectiveness analysis (295 articles, 90.8%). However, most of the included literature did not report study perspective (267 articles, 90.2%). The average QHES score of the included literature was 57.29, and the quality of the literature was concentrated in “low quality” (123 articles, 37.8%) and “average quality” (138 articles, 42.5%). Literature published in English journals, or using modeling methods, or from universities had relatively higher quality. The quality of economic evaluation literature on drugs for type 2 diabetes based on the Chinese population is generally low at present. There are many problems, such as single research institutions and methods, lack of research perspectives, and no sensitivity analysis.
