Mental Health and Well-Being of University Students: A Bibliometric Mapping of the Literature

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to map the literature on mental health and well-being of university students using metadata extracted from 5,561 journal articles indexed in the Web of Science database for the period 1975-2020. More specifically, this study uses bibliometric procedures to describe and visually represent the available literature on mental health and well-being in university students in terms of the growth trajectory, productivity, social structure, intellectual structure, and conceptual structure of the field over 45 years. Key findings of the study are that research on mental health and well-being in university students: (a) has experienced a steady growth over the last decades, especially since 2010; (b) is disseminated in a wide range of journals, mainly in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and education research; (c) is published by scholars with diverse geographical background, although more than half of the publications are produced in the United States; (d) lies on a fragmented research community composed by multiple research groups with little interactions between them; (e) is relatively interdisciplinary and emerges from the convergence of research conducted in the behavioral and biomedical sciences; (f) tends to emphasize pathogenic approaches to mental health (i.e., mental illness); and (g) has mainly addressed seven research topics over the last 45 years: positive mental health, mental disorders, substance abuse, counseling, stigma, stress, and mental health measurement. The findings are discussed, and the implications for the future development of the field are highlighted.

Keywords: VOSViewer; bibliometric review; higher education; mental health; mental illness; psychological distress; university students; well-being.

FIGURE 1

Methodological framework.

FIGURE 2

Growth of research on mental health and well-being of university students.

FIGURE 3

Collaborative research networks between researchers. Only researchers with five or more publications were considered in the analysis (n = 179).

FIGURE 4

Collaborative research networks between countries and territories. Only countries with 20 or more publications were considered in the analysis (n = 45).

FIGURE 5

Map of clustered network journals based on co-citation data. Only publications with 50 or more citations were considered in the analysis (n = 593).

FIGURE 6

Topical foci in mental health and well-being of university students research. Only keywords with 25 or more occurrences were considered in the analysis (n = 84).